


Living Things

by flollius



Series: Tracing Lines [6]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Blood and Violence, Dwarvish feminism, Emotional Abuse, F/M, Family Issues, I promise there is no rape, If you liked Burning Bright then you'll love this, In which I partner Kili up with someone as lost and broken as he is, Kind of incest if you want to read it that way (I left it open on purpose), Like this is really fucked up but not in an explicit way, Pretty much entirely original, Sequel to Frailty, Updated weekly, exploring power dynamics in a society with hugely imbalanced genders, indulge me in this, psychological abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2019-11-04 20:41:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 47,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17905268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flollius/pseuds/flollius
Summary: The youngest daughter of a noble Ironfist house, Vala learns to keep her mouth closed and eyes open. As she grows, Vala finds herself drawn against her will closer and closer into the inner workings of her violent, merciless family. The arrival of a dark-haired stranger from the west, with one hand on the Ironfist throne, throws her world into chaos and forces Vala to reconsider everything she's ever known.Or; what happened to Kili after he went off to the Orocanis to stake a claim for his brother's throne, and how he fell in love along the way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well I said I was thinking about a sequel...
> 
> The germ of this was formed in early/mid 2017, when I started entertaining the idea of 'what next?' and I start thinking about what would happen to Kili in the East, how all of that would go. And then I wove this whole drama together, and in the heart of it was this entirely new character, Vala. And as I started exploring her a bit more, I realised that this was a story that had to be told from beginning to end, from when she's a little girl, and that to really work, it had to be told entirely through her eyes. So apologies in advance for that, but I think you'll see why it had to be that way as it goes on. 
> 
> (Kili does show up, later on. I promise.)
> 
> BTW, if you haven't read any of the previous fics, you should be able to get the gist of this. I know asking you to read something that's 730,000 words first is a bit of an ask. So I tried to make this self-contained, so it doesn't necessarily rely on the others to make sense. 
> 
> Like the tags say, this will be updated weekly. This bad boy is already sitting on my Word doc ready to go. So no more waiting for months for me to update. Yay! :)

“Come on, Vala!”

Her sister’s ringing voice is a bellbird, urgent and haughty. Her figure cuts open red scab against the snow, bundled in her cloak with the hood drawn deep over her face. Hekyr stands beside her, a swollen fruit hanging low on the branch. Ready to be plucked and eaten. “Hurry up!”

But Vala lingers. The air mists as she breathes out, in, feels the burn in her lungs, a tightness, a shrivelling, and then release. She relishes the chilly perfume of ice and wind, of the earth lingering beneath the blanket of snow. Soon she’ll retreat underground, to stone and smoke and fire, to the darkness of the mountain, for another hibernation.

“Vala!” Freja stamps her foot. Always so impatient. Her sister sees Vala as an unwelcome grudge, an intruder on her life. Freja has no time for stopping and looking, breathing in the window of the world. She lives her life as though blindfolded, thinking only of herself.

“Come now, missy.” A firm hand presses into her back. Brunhild, the nurse, is unyielding. She’s brick and mortar both, sheltering the two girls, binding them together. “Don’t keep your sister waiting.”

Vala wrinkles her nose and relents. Brunhild is more mother to her than any of her kin, but she can be as sharp as a whip if she’s pushed too hard. Her new dreadlocks thump against her shoulders as she moves, a strange, uninvited feeling.

She’s a big girl now, they told her yesterday before holding her down. It was long overdue; if she were a boy, it would have been done years ago. Brunhild and Father made Vala sit for hours while the maid took threads of her hair, half the width of her little finger, tied them tight with string, looped in little silver trinkets and pulled and pulled and pulled her soft curls with a silver comb until she thought they would fall out. Vala whined and complained and struggled until her father erupted at her resistance, and he hit her hard.

A breeze whistles through the valley, and Vala shivers. She can still feel the whip-crack against her cheek, the flash of white as the world reeled beneath her feet in a rolling moment of terror.

“Don’t be scared. You’re a big girl now,” she repeats to herself, unaware of what that meant, yet.  

* * *

Hekyr, with her round stomach like the pigs’ bladders Vala watches dwarrows kick along the street from her nursery window, finally gives birth in the spring thaw. Vala listens, holding on to brother Úni’s hand as Húni walks back and forth in front of the fire. The long, wounded moan sounds like an animal dying. She knows nothing about childbirth – just that it killed Mother. Perhaps her brother Húni is thinking the same thing, she wonders, as he turns on his heel to stare at the closed door.

But she doesn’t die, and neither does the child. Something shifts in the house, with the birth of Rúni. Vala isn’t the youngest anymore. The morning after the birth, Brunhild dresses her, wipes her face and fixes her hair before getting down on her knees to look her in the eye.

“I have to look after Rúni, now.” Her voice is low and grave. It sounds as though she’s saying goodbye forever. “Lína will help you get dressed. And you’ll be spending your days with Freja in her lessons.”

And then the only mother she’s ever had takes her carefully by the hand and leads her down the stairs. She stands outside a room Vala’s never been in, knocks on the door and waits for it to open.

“She’s your charge now.” A squeeze of the hand, and Brunhild is gone. Vala swallows, overcome by terror at this new stranger looming over her, but she doesn’t cry.

It’s all right. She’s a big girl.

“Come in, child. You’re letting the heat out.” The dam snaps. She’s as broad and square as one of Úni’s books, dressed in a rigid grey dress with a little while collar.

“No!”  Freja is sitting at a small table in the middle of the room. “Signí, no. She’ll ruin it. She ruins _everything_.”

“Hush, Miss Freja. Your sister is no younger than you were when you came into my care.” Vala shrinks away from her smile. It seems artificial, uneasy. “I’ll whip you into shape, Miss Vala.” Signí points to a hard little chair by the fire. “Sit there, and we’ll start with some basic letters.”

Vala ignores the burning gaze of her sister. She longs to return to her nursery, with the toys and the bearskin rug that she’d roll about on and playact as a cub. But that room has been closed off to her – it’s Rúni’s now. His toys and his rug and his Brunhild. She scowls at the thought.

* * *

Once a month, sometimes twice, there’s a feast. Vala is sent to bed early, where she lies in her bed, and listens to the shouts and cheers and fiddles. Freja gets to go, and Húni and Úni too, sometimes, but she’s left to sour in loneliness and jealousy in the dark.

Vala always pretends to be asleep when Freja finally enters, so late it’s almost morning. Her sister wears strange clothes – skirts cut so high they show all her legs, bodices with no stomach to them, sleeves of gauze as thin as a spiderweb. Vala watches through slitted eyes, thinking it’s something out of a fairy story, something strange and faraway. The handmaid, Lína, undresses her slowly, packs the clothes into a locked trunk and wipes carefully at her face with a wet cloth, until it comes away red and black and pink. Freja sits on her stool in her nightgown, her back to Vala, never saying anything, and when she moves, it’s with a slow creakiness, as though her limbs have rusted into place.

Lína locks the door with a key on a long chain around her neck. Every time. “Goodnight, Freja.” She breathes, before stretching out on her low bed on the floor beside Vala’s own.

“Why do you lock the door, Lína?” She once asks the darkness, when the three of them are tucked in, waiting for dawn.

“Why do you think, idiot?” Freja scoffs. “To keep us in.” Her words run together. If they were written, they would be lopsided and misspelled.

“No, dear.” Lína says. “To keep the others out.”

* * *

Vala watches everything with her large, blue eyes, nearly forgotten in this house. She takes lessons in the morning and is sent away in the afternoons to sit alone in her room, locked out of whatever secrets Freja and Signí share. She doesn’t know what Húni and Hekyr do. Father is too preoccupied with his money, with finding a husband for sister Freja and bullying brother Úni to take a wife, with a dozen over trivialities she doesn’t remember or understand.

“You’re old enough,” he snarls across the table one night at Úni, spittle in his beard and his cheeks flushed red from too much wine.

"I don’t have enough money,” Úni insists. “I’m doing my best, but I can’t afford a dowry. If you lent—”

“I didn’t need money, and neither did your brother.” Hekyr has stopped eating and looks strangely as though she was about to cry. Freja’s own eyes move rapidly from one to the other, afraid. It’s not often her sister will show her fear to anybody. Húni leans back in his chair, smiling and triumphant at the mention of him.

Úni glares at Father, his teeth gritted. “I’ll never do that. I won’t.” Then Father spits on the table, and Vala, with a slow, lumbering fear that paws at her belly, realises that they hate each other.

But Vala is happy to slip past in quietness and obscurity. She lingers, ignored, like an earring lost down the back of a cushioned bench. They’re all made of different parts, she comes to understand, despite the blood that binds them all to another.

She grows solitary and suffocated in her loneliness. Father is disinterested in her, Freja sneers at her ignorance, Húni terrifies her, Hekyr hides in her chamber and refuses to talk to anybody except Freja, and Signí is curt and sparse. Her only true friend in the world is Úni, soft-eyed and sixty, who spends his days in the town clerking for a wealthy scholar, but comes home in the evening to shut himself up in his garret room.

Vala snatches greedily at this chance of contact whenever she can, and Úni never dares begrudge her for it. In that small cell after an early supper, barely big enough for a narrow bed and a table with a single chair, Vala sits on her brother’s knee and he reads to her, or gives her a stub of pencil and she shows him how she’s been learning to write. It’s the only time she feels safe, with his arms drawn around her, resting on his chest.

“You’re not going to leave, are you?” She asks him the day after Father’s newest explosion, small and afraid.

“Why would I do that?”

“Father says you have to get married. He said he’ll throw you out if you don’t.” She looks around the room. It’s a quarter of the size of what she shares with Freja, with cracked whitewash over the walls and no rug. Even Vala can see that Father is trying to drive Úni out of the house with discomfort and misery, into the arms of a wife he doesn’t want.

Úni chuckles. “Don’t listen to Father. He’s all talk. We’re his children. He’d never do anything to hurt us.”

But Vala remembers the slap, the threatening rumble in his voice, and knows that isn’t true.

* * *

Once a week, after they return from their long walk outdoors, Vala bathes with her sister. Lína and two kitchen-girls run up and down the stairs with buckets of steaming water, filling up a large stone bathtub carved out of the floor. When the bath is ready, Vala slips in, light and nimble, twirling like a water-nymph from one of Úni’s stories. Freya, however, waits in her underclothes, her hands clasped tight.

Vala knows what she’s waiting for.

Húni enters, and he pulls a tiny key on a long chain out from under his shirt. “Come, sister.” His smile doesn’t meet his eyes. “Time to bathe.”

Vala curls herself up into a ball underneath the water. She watches with the same creeping horror and disgust that she knows Freja must feel, though neither will admit it to the other. Freja pulls her clothes off slowly, until all she’s wearing is the belt. The iron band, black and battered, sits above her hips, and goes in between her legs. Vala doesn’t know what it’s for, but she watches Freja’s toes curl as the key slides into the lock, below her bellybutton, and she knows that whatever it is, it hurts her.

Húni sits on a stool, leans against the wall and watches them both with folded arms. Freja submits as the handmaid kneels behind her and washes her hair and scrubs her all over with a small wooden brush. Vala crouches in the water, ignored, rubbing soap half-heartedly over her limbs and trying to shield her body from her brother.

“I’m sorry.” Vala whispers when they’re finally alone, when Húni has put the iron belt back around her waist and between her legs and has left them.

“What for?” Freja sneers, cold as ice. “You’ll get your turn soon enough, you know.”

* * *

“Does the king have any children?” Vala asks Úni, in the midst of her clumsy writing.

“Eh?” He frowns.

“King Vili. Does he have children? Or does he live all alone in that castle?” She’s never seen him before, but Father is said to know him well.

“He— He doesn’t have children, no. He has a grandson, who lives far, far away. Prince Fili. They say he’ll come and rule over us someday.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Why isn’t he here now?”

“Because, Miss Nosey, he just isn’t. Now look at these runes, I can’t even read them. Start again and concentrate.” Úni considers the conversation over, but Vala doesn’t forget.

What happens if he doesn’t come?

* * *

The family are on a special outing, while Rúni waits at home in Brunhild’s arms. They take their open carriage, which bears the family insignia on the door in faded gold paint – a lion clutching an axe, rearing on its hindpaws. Vala can draw it from memory.

Freja stares straight ahead, and Úni mimics her. Father and Húni lean across and talk to each other in low voices, lost between the clopping of hooves. Hekyr rests a hand on her husband’s knee, and smiles at him, but Vala watches as he pushes her away.

“Where are we going?” Vala asks her sister.

Freja glances down at her. “I told you. The ring.” Vala bites the inside of her cheek. She’s been a number of times now, watched as dwarves had their hands cut off, or their eyes gouged out, or are set upon huge stakes of wood. She’s not allowed to cry; Father slaps her if he sees her crying, and sends her to bed without supper. But it’s so hard, sometimes. She’s so frightened.

The air is sharp, and she can taste the remnants of a frost. She wears new gloves, lined with the soft, grey fur of a rabbit, and her sister’s grasp feels clumsy and unsure.

“I’m thirsty,” she murmurs.

“Shush.” But Freja is stern and unfeeling. There is no room in her heart for pity. “You’re a big girl, Vala. Sit down and be quiet this time.”

She takes her place on the bench, near the front of the round earthen bowl. The seats form a ring around the ground, seating hundreds. Father, Húni, his wife, Úni, Freja, her – they perch like a row of birds on a branch. Vala folds her hands in her lap, and watches.

A dam is dragged into the dust. This is different. Vala hasn’t seen a dam before. Her dreadlocks have been cut off, and her face is covered with cuts and bruises, her hands tied behind her back. The dwarves cheer and shout, but Freja remains silent, staring ahead, her face tight, closed off, giving nothing away.

There’s a small wooden platform set up, a rope dangling from a frame. A dwarf, one in rich-looking robes, reads from a scroll. The dam is sentenced to death for murder, he calls into the bitter wind. She killed her husband and will pay the ultimate price for it. She is on her knees, sobbing and shaking her shorn head.

Vala whimpers, turns away as the dam is dragged up the stairs and onto the platform. “Stop it.” Freja hisses, grabs her by the shoulders turns her back. “You need to see this. Look at it. _Look_.”

They’re forcing the noose around her neck. Her cry is a thin, desperate wail, nearly lost in the wind. Jeers and catcalls rise against her, dwarves making slashing motions across their throats. Húni shouts too, calls her a vile cunt getting what she deserves. Hekyr is very pale.

There’s dried blood on the ground in the ring, as brown and shrivelled as dead flower-petals. Old blood. And then a dwarf in a black hood covering his face is pulling on the rope and the dam is lifted up, her legs kicking out at the air, eyes wide and bulging in her purple face.

“You see?” Freja hisses in her ear. The dwarves rise to their feet, they shout and swear as the dam writhes like a fish on the line. “That’s what happens to girls who don’t do as they’re told.” She hangs limply from the noose, those wide eyes still and glassy. “Do you understand?”

The tears flow silently down her cheeks, and Vala hopes Father can’t see them. “Yes.” 

* * *

That night, Father leads prayer. They all hold candles and kneel on the ground as he stands before them, his voice rising against the stone. He utters a blessing for the dwarf that was killed, murdered at the hands of his wife, asks Mahal to guide him to peace in the Eternal Halls.

What about the dam? Does she find peace? The question floats through Vala’s mind, but she knows better than to ask it. Father’s attachment to religion, Úni said once during their cosy evenings together, is a reaction to the chaos and disorder of the world around him. The ornate hierarchy of priests and monks and brothers and brides to Mahal, the temples and halls, it’s his only sense of order, and he fights bitterly for it.

The wax is soft and warm in her hands, and Vala watches the flame flicker. She whispers her own prayer, under her breath. She asks Mahal to keep the dam’s soul safe, too.

* * *

One night, they’re awoken by the sound of a dam screaming. It’s desperate and shrill and reminds Vala of the ring. Freja tears the key from Lína’s neck and fumbles at the lock, hands shaking. Vala follows her, not knowing what else to do. She doesn’t want to be alone in here.

The door to Hekyr’s chamber, a private, pretty room Vala is never allowed to enter, is open, and smoke billows through the doorway. She can smell burning hair from the passageway and a something else, salty and animal. The servants are standing around in their shabby nightclothes, and some are crying. Nobody looks at her. One of the house-guards takes Freja by the arm and pulls her away before she can enter the room, but Vala is small and ignored in the chaos.

What she witnesses sears itself on her brain, gouged in thick inky lines, like the marks on her brother Húni’s hands and wrists. Úni is being held down by two of the house-guards, pressed to the floor and lying naked on his belly. He’s screaming and sobbing, there’s blood on the side of his face, and his arms are purple and discoloured and his legs are at bent at awful, awful angles. Then she sees the thick, pale form of a dam’s body stretched out along the rug, her head and shoulders in the smouldering fireplace.

Everything crashes to a halt. The black, shrunken skin reminds Vala of the balls of paper Úni would throw in the fire when he made a mistake. It’s Hekyr, she realises dully. Somebody threw _her_ in the fire.

“How could you, you bastard!” Húni stands over his brother, kicks him in the side. A monstrous hammer dangles from one hand. Vala shrinks against the wall, and cannot breathe. “She was my wife!” His hands are black with soot, and look scorched and blistered.

“Húni!” Her father thunders behind her. “What have you done?!”

“They were together, Father! In her bed! M-My own brother!” Vala has never seen a rage like this from him before. Húni is shaking, stamping his feet, flashing his eyes and gnashing his teeth. “I’ll kill him, the treacherous piece of—”

“No!” Father shouts. Then a hand snatches her, pulls her into the throng of bodies clustered at the door, whispering and weeping. “You’ve done enough!”

“Vala!” Brunhild hisses in her ear. “What are you doing? Come away, now!”

“No!” Vala struggles, a feral cat caught in a trap lashing out with teeth and claws. All she can see is her brother, broken and trapped, with Húni leering over him.  “Úni— I—I have to help him—”

“Help?” She laughs, bitterly, and the hopelessness of it catches on something in Vala’s chest. She’s never heard Brunhild like this before, and her hands fall still. “There’s no helping him anymore, Miss Vala. Come, before your brother sees you. Húni will be smelling blood tonight. You and Miss Freja have to keep away from him.”

Freja and her handmaid are already in the bedchamber. Lína is silent and shaking as she lets Vala in, and Freja sits on her bed, arms wrapped around her knees as she stares at the wall. She has been crying, Vala notices with a start. She’s never, ever seen Freja cry before.

“He burned her.” It sounds like the voice of somebody else. Vala can still smell it, as though the blackened hair and skin was pressed against her face, smothering her. The cold terror is filling her up, slowly, as the shock slowly ebbs back. It’s all in pieces to her. Nothing fits together and she can’t make any sense of this. Why did he do it? What happened?

“I know.” They look at each other. Freja has lost her haughtiness and arrogance, that familiar sneer that Vala has grown to dislike. She looks as small and young and lost as Vala feels, reaching blindly in the dark for somebody to help her, but finding nobody. There was nobody to help either of them now. They have both lost their only ally.

She crawls onto the bed, beside Freja, and her sister does nothing to stop her. “Is Úni going to die?”

Freja unwinds her limbs, and looks down at her. Vala can feel the press of that cold iron belt against her side. Through the locked door, they can still hear muffled shouts and cries of pain, or anger, or both. “I don’t know.”

* * *

Nobody tells Vala what happened to Úni, and she’s too afraid to ask. She knows better than to show any allegiance to him when he’s made such a terrible enemy of Húni. Whenever she closes her eyes, she sees Úni’s naked, broken body, the burned remains of Hekyr, just within arm’s reach.

There’s no funeral for Hekyr. It’s almost as though they want to forget she ever existed. They resume their lessons after a day’s respite, although Signí seems less hesitant to chastise Vala for her mistakes. Father and Húni go on as before, chilly and severe, ignoring Vala unless absolutely necessary. Rúni, seven years old now, whines and cries for _Amad_ at first, but Brunhild manages to keep him quiet during their gatherings with toys and sweetmeats, and in time, he seems to forget about her.

But Freja grows withdrawn, keeps her head down at supper, refuses breakfast and has to be dragged out of bed. Vala lies awake and night and listens to her sniffles and panicked breathing, bewildered, terrified, helpless. What can either of them do?

For the first time, Vala realises there is a noose around her own neck, tightening a little further with every step she takes. Húni dominates them completely. Now that she knows to look for it, she starts to notice things. The house-guards go to Húni, not Father, for orders. Húni signs for all the letters. Húni is responsible for paying the servants. Father sits at the head of the table, is the first to drink the wine and cut into the meat, heads the prayers and leads the family on their rare outings to the ring, but he is a leader only in name. It’s all a sham. She bears the revelation quietly. There is nobody to reveal this too, for Vala understands that she is the last person to know.

* * *

It’s a dull, grey morning as Vala takes her next walk. The mountaintops are lost in a thick haze, and she can taste the incoming rain on her tongue.

But she walks along the track in her trained obedience. Freja remains half a dozen paces ahead of her, staring out straight ahead with her hands lax at her sides. It feels like a death march for the both of them. Neither speak a word.

* * *

One afternoon, after Freja and Signí retreat for their private instruction and Vala is left to wander the house alone, Lína takes her by the hand and leads her through the kitchen and into the larder.

“Put these on.” She pushes a lump of clothing onto her – the dingy grey smock and apron of a kitchen-girl. “Quickly.” The cloth is worn, coarser than what she’s used to, and the smock itches against her skin. “Take off your shoes and socks.”

“What happening?” Vala is wide-eyed but absolutely trusting. “Am I in trouble?”

“You won’t be, if you keep quiet.” Lína takes her elbow and leads her into the kitchen. “Sóva, she’s ready.”

“Good, let’s go.” The second cook, a stout dam of at least two hundred, wipes her greasy hands on a rag.  A basket is thrust into Vala’s chest, and she takes it carefully under one arm.

“Go with Sóva. You’ll be back soon, just trust me.” Vala looks behind her, but the maid is gone, and this stranger has her by the shoulder, leading her out the back door and across a narrow, dirty square. It’s cluttered with wooden boxes, a cart half-laden with straw, with tin buckets filled with reeking meat. Chickens peck about at the mess. Unused to this squalor, Vala clamps a hand over her mouth and nose.

“Where are we going?” But Sóva ignores her. She pushes open the gate and steps into a narrow little alley, and Vala follows her. Wordlessly, Sóva seizes her wrist and pulls her through the scattered crowd. Everyone is so hunched and shrivelled and dirty, and Vala’s stomach turns at the stench. Who were all of these people, and how could they stand to live like this? Was this what the world was like outside her home, outside the carriage and the walks and the ring?

It’s a frightening maze to Vala, but Sóva seems to know exactly where she was going. The cook barrels on through the crowd, untouched and unaffected by the poverty that burrows through Vala’s eyes and nose and ears. Her soft bare feet are unused to the cobblestones, the bits of chicken-bone and sharp fragments of rock. Twice she steps in the filth of an animal and gags. But she’s one kitchen-girl amongst dozens, a downcast dwarrow in grey rags, invisible. Vala, daughter of Túni, cousin to the king, has vanished.

Sóva leads her through another gate into a narrow square like her family’s own. The door is already open, and a cook smoking a pipe nods at them both. “You’re late.” She taps the bowl against the palm of her hand, knocking out charred, sticky tobacco. “Come on in.”

“Leave the basket on the table.” Sóva orders as she closed the door behind her. “Follow her.” She points to the cook. “She’ll send you down when you’re finished.”

Finished what? But Vala bites her tongue. Nobody ever cares about what she had to say. She follows the ruddy old cook up a lopsided staircase, down a dim, narrow passageway, and up more stairs. Finally, near the top of the house itself, the cook slowed down outside a closed, battered door.

“Go on, then.” She jerks her head. With her heart pounding, Vala slowly lifts the latch, and steps inside.

Her legs weaken. Stretched out across the bed, beneath a heap of blankets, is her brother. His arms are folded across his chest, wrapped in steel. It looks like armour. “Úni.” She stumbles to the bed and seizes handfuls of the blankets, trembling.

“Vala.” His voice catches. “Kolla said you may be coming. I refused to hope. How are you here?”

“Sóva brought me.” She longs to crawl into his arms, like she used to, but all she can see is those purple, twisted limbs spread across the floor. “I thought you were dead.”

“Dead to Father, but not to the world.” He chances a shaky smile. “This is Víglund’s house. He’s Hekyr’s uncle. He’s going to look after me until I’m better.”

“And then you’ll come home?” But it’s pathetic and untrue.

“I can’t come home again.” He says. “I’m sorry, Vala. But I can’t ever go back there. Húni will kill me.” She believes him.

They talk for a long time, until the candle at Úni’s elbow is soft and low and threatens to collapse in on itself. Úni shares what Vala had come to suspect, that Húni rules the house with a merciless iron fist, that Father is only a puppet-leader, and that Húni has designs on more houses, more families, more power. Rúni isn’t enough to seed out his empire.

“If I could, I’d take you away.” He whispers. “Mahal, I wish I was strong enough. But I’m weak. And I can’t protect you anymore.” Lightly, she takes hold of his fingertips.  “And Freja won’t help you. She only cares about herself. But don’t begrudge her for that. It’s hard for her.”

Vala nods. “I know. I’ve seen what Húni does in the bath.” Úni sinks down into the pillows, looking up at the ceiling. A great pain seems to have taken hold of him, making it hard for him to speak. “It’s going to happen to me, too, isn’t it?”

“You’ll have to be strong, Vala.” He finally rasps. “Just keep your head down and stay quiet. Maybe one day... One day I’ll be able to save you.”

But he’s so broken and diminished. Vala knows she can’t depend on him. With a cold chill, she realises that she never could.


	2. Chapter 2

The next big shock is a year or so later. Húni draws his sisters and father into their main parlour, a pretty room that was furnished with velvet cushions and handsome woodturned benches, barely used. It’s too formal for Húni’s wild feasts.

“We’ve reached an agreement with a close friend of our family, Mýr.” Vala doesn’t know him, but Freja goes rigid. “He’s offered a handsome bride-price for Freja, and after some negotiations, we have settled on a sum.”

Vala wonders who really led the negotiations. Father is silent, staring vacantly into the distance. A tight grin, almost a sneer, plays on Húni’s lips. He is victorious. “You will wed him in a month, Freja, at the temple of Mahal. It will be a wonderful union for us.”

But Freja says nothing. She is silent during dinner, their customary drink afterwards and through evening prayers. She clutches her candle, the flickering light throwing deep shadows over her bent face, as pale and vacant as a skull.

“Are you all right?” Vala whispers after they’ve both dressed for bed. Freja sits on the edge of the mattress, her palms flat on her thighs, stone-still. “Freja? Are you—”

“I’m fine.” And for a moment the old Freja breaks through, with a jeer and a snarl. “Mind your business. And go to sleep.”

“Do you know who Mýr is?”

Freja’s lip curls, baring her teeth in a sneer of disgust. “Oh, I know him, all right.”

* * *

Signí clasps her hands together and sighs, says there’s much to teach Freja over the coming weeks that can’t be exposed to prying young eyes. Vala is sent out of the room with her books and her slate and her needlework, left to her own devices. The dull monotony of her stitching bores her, and when she tries to read, the runes all merge together and squirm on the page. She listens at doors, lurks in hallways as she tries to learn more about her narrow, cloistered world. Húni has taken to ordering the servants around and getting everything ready. He insists on a feast grand enough for King Vili himself to attend. It’s a great moment for the family, and he refuses to humble himself.

“What is Signí teaching you?” Vala asks one night, after Freja has finished her lessons. “Why can’t I see?”

“Because it’s not for little girls like you.”

“I’m nearly twenty.”

Freja scoffs. “You haven’t even had your first blood yet. And look at what you’ve got. Two insect bites.”  Vala self-consciously folds her arms across her chest. “I’m learning how to serve my new husband. Signí says if I want to keep him happy, I need to do my duty well.”

“Duty?”

Freja rolls her eyes. “You know.”

She doesn’t really, but Vala nods all the same. “Are you frightened?”

“Of what, marriage?”  There’s a pause. “Whatever Mýr has in store for me, it can’t be worse than this.”

* * *

The wedding inches closer, but Vala and Freja drift further part. The rift between them becomes a yawning, impassable chasm, and she knows her sister is lost. All her attempts at kindness and kinship are mocked and spurned, and eventually Vala flees, wounded and alone, to her old playroom. Brunhild is with Rúni, old enough to play with her old wooden figurines – a horse, a dwarf, a dragon.

“Dear,” Brunhild softens in that old, maternal love that nobody has time to expend on her. “Come now, what’s wrong?”

“I h-h-hate her!” Vala throws herself on the old bearskin rug and sobs. “She’s so awful to me, Brunhild, and I don’t know why. Wh-What did I do to upset her? Why is she always so cruel?”

Brunhild takes her in her heavy arms and soft bosom and cradles her close. She’s too large now, her arms and legs spill out, but she doesn’t mind. “Nothing, dear. You did nothing. Freja is an impertinent little thing. Always has been. There’s too much of your mother in her, insisting on fighting the world alone.” It’s because she killed Mother, Vala knows it. The suspicion has always lurked within her, a dull ache that rose and subsided with the mention of her. Freja will always see her as the spiteful little demon that took her mother away.

“I’m glad she’s going,” She growls at the fire, hoping to smother her guilt with anger and hate. “Mýr can have her. We’ll both be happy.”

“Oh, darling, she’s not going to be happy.” Brunhild murmurs against her thin dreadlocks. “She’s never been happy.”

* * *

Vala wakes in the morning to a strange wetness between her thighs. She pulls back the sheets and screams – blood, a little trickle, has stained the cotton a dull brownish-red. Is this what Freja meant?

Lína claps and beams, but Freja sits with a strange frown, staring at the wall. “You’re a dwarrowdam now, little miss,” the handmaid smiles.

“I’m not sick?”

“Nay, it comes to all of us, in time. Come, get that nightie off and we’ll wash it out. Freja dear, she’ll have to borrow some of your things for now. You’re not due for another week, at least.” Freja is just looking at her, chewing on her lip, but Vala’s given up on trying to pick her apart.

Lína takes some thick cloth, as wide as Vala’s palm and as long as her forearm, and shows her how to tie it with a soft girdle beneath her shift. “This’ll last you the day,” she pats Vala’s arm. “Although we’ll put the red dress on, just in case. And I’ll get some willowbark tea for the pains. It’s a big change for you, Vala. We’ll have much to tell you very soon.”

* * *

Soon, she’ll be alone in this room, with Lína, listening to the throb of music through layers of wood and rock. Vala wakes in the morning before the others and lies still, listening to the soft whistle of her sister’s breath. Embers are cool and dull in the fireplace. 

Freja rises in time, sluggish as always, and bleary-eyed. She tosses in the night, thrashing in the bedclothes. Sometimes Vala can hear her whispering to herself.

“Can I have your bed?” She asks, impudent. “Yours is closer to the fire.”

Freja sneers. “Can’t wait to get rid of me, can you?” The snub only stings a little; she’s used to it, and Vala resolves she will take the bed, annex it from the memory of her sister.

Will she be lonely? She’ll have Lína at least – bony, colourless Lína with her downcast eyes and her thin mouth, who speaks in whispers and only when strictly necessary. Father is alone, she remembers, and Húni too, now that Hekyr is gone.

“Do you think Húni ever feels lonely?” Vala pipes up as her sister dresses, sucking in as Lína laces her into a corset that makes her breasts stick out and her waist halve in width.

“What do you mean, lonely?”

“Well,” She murmurs, “Hekyr’s gone, so...”

“Ha!” Freja scoffs. “You think he’s _lonely,_ sister?” she gives Lína a brief, uneasy look. “He makes his own fun at night.”

“The feasts?”

“After.” The handmaid flinches away. “Why do you think Lína would rather sleep on the floor here than the servants’ rooms?” The chain gleams at Lína’s throat. “Lina, can you do my hair to the left? I saw Hlífa wear it once and it was _so_ pretty...”

Vala sits in her nightdress on the edge of the bed. It’s some time before she understands what Freja will not say.

* * *

The night before the wedding, Húni summons her, alone. He’s in his study, with the faded tapestries on the walls, the table filled with papers and the stool behind it, his great leather chair before the fire. Vala has never been in here by herself before. The flames have sunken into embers, staining her brother’s skin and hair red.

“From tomorrow, you’ll be the only dwarrowdam in the house, Vala.” That twisted smile lingers on the corner of his mouth, and Vala can feel her heart start to pick up with fear. It’s the smile he wears when she’s bathing, turned away from him, dreadlocks carefully arranged over her shoulders in an attempt to hide her body. “And twenty, come the summer. You’re not a little girl anymore.”

He pauses, expecting an answer. “No, Húni.” Her voice creaks in her throat.

“I heard from Lína that you had your first blood two weeks past.” Traitor. Her fingers curl. “Did she explain what that meant?”

“Yes, Húni.” He rises from his great chair, crosses the room to his table, where a low wooden trunk rests. “She said I’m a dwarrowdam now. I can have babes of my own.” It swings open, the jaws of a beast, and Húni extracts what is inside.

It’s one of the iron belts that Freja wears, removed only for her weekly bath. Blood freezes to ice, and Vala stands immobile. “Take off your clothes, sister.” Húni demands, smooth as silk, chilly as a spring frost. “Don’t keep me waiting.”

Vala forces her stiff limbs to move. A slug of disgust oozes down her neck, her spine, leaves a shiver that breaks out across her skin as she unfastens the bodice of her dress. The pale fabric puddles around her feet, and the trembling builds as she grips the hem of her shift. She pleads wordlessly for mercy, but it falls ineffectually against stone.

When she’s naked, Húni walks towards her with his hands held out. His eye is roaming; he weighs her up, measures her worth like a trinket or a fine pig. Already, he must be calculating his bride-price. Freja is taken care of; now his attention is on her, and there is no one else to shoulder the burden. She sees for the first time that the middle band, the part that must sit between her legs, features a row of teeth, a small opening just wider than her finger. It takes all the strength she has to stand still.

“We have to be careful.” The words are kind, but his voice is as cold as ever. “There are people who would hurt you. They would do terrible things. Some dwarves take their wives by breaking into their rooms and forcing themselves on her. Then she must marry the one that attacked her. You don’t want that, do you, Vala?”

Something strange glitters in Húni’s eye, the twist builds in his mouth, and with a rolling drumbeat banging against her breastbone, Vala finally understands what happened to Hekyr. Húni doesn’t wait for an answer. He crouches down at her feet, expectantly. Vala feels lifeless as she steps into the belt the way she steps into her woollen stockings on cold mornings. There’s no use in fighting him; she was always iron-bound.  Slowly, slowly, Húni rises, running the belt up her legs until the band sits just above Vala’s hips. She squeezes her eyes shut, so she cannot see him.

“This is a good fit for you.” Húni murmurs. The cold iron grips her skin, a manacle she will never be free from. She feels a small tug, hears the click of a lock, and opens her eyes to see Húni drape a key on a long golden chain over his head. It’s held in place with a gold lock, inlaid with garnets.

“You will be able to use the privy as normal. Lína will show you what you need to know.” Húni steps back, indifferent and businesslike now his job was over. Vala’s hands remain at her side, locked obediently into place. “But be careful. The teeth are sharp.” He bares his own at the joke. “And we’ll take it off for you when you bathe.” Just as he did for Freja.

Húni turns to his table, and closes the empty trunk. “It’s late and we have a long day tomorrow.  Go and rest.” Vala sinks to her knees at the command, scrabbles for her shift and yanks it over her head. As Húni sinks into his chair, triumphant, and she sweeps her dress under one arm. “Good night, Vala.”

Somehow, she makes it down the hallway before the tears start. Vala crushes the dress against her face and masks her sobs in the heavy fabric. With the clumsy uncertainty of an infant, she climbs the stairs and staggers into her bedroom, clawing at the locked door. “Let me in,” she moans against the panelling. “Mahal, Lína, please.”

The lock clicks, and the door swings open. Freja is already in bed, reading a book. Her gaze lifts when she hears Vala sobbing. “What happened?”

“What happened?”  The crumpled bundle of her dress and slippers falls to the floor. “This happened!” Vala pulls the shift up to her waist to show her sister the iron belt with the bejewelled golden lock. The book sinks into Freja’s lap, ignored.

Lína puts a hand on her arm, but Vala pulls away. “You knew, didn’t you? He was waiting for my first blood to put it on. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“No one was around to tell me.” Freja’s stare is hard and distant. “Why should you have the right?”

Lína strokes her hair, offers sweetmeats, but Vala turns away from her and crawls into bed. It hurts to lie on her side; the iron digs into her hip, and the metal bites her thighs if she moves. So she lies on her back, her legs slightly apart. When she’s sure Lína and Freja are sleeping, she reaches beneath her nightgown and explores in the darkness this foreign intrusion gatekeeping the most intimate parts of her body. The teeth are sharp – they scratch into her finger and when she sucks on it, Vala tastes blood.

Freja sees the cut in the morning, while they’re dressing, and leans in with a conniving leer while Lína is bent over the fire. “Should have had your fun when you could, sister.”

Vala is numb, and doesn’t understand her.

* * *

All her family come for the wedding – distant cousins and uncles and aunts she didn’t know she had. They clasp her by the arm, kiss her cheeks and smile at her. You look so much like your mother, they murmur, looking a little sad. She sees the figure of King Vili, thronged in guards and draped with gems and furs and gold. He seems shrunken beneath his stone crown and heavy cloak.

The ceremony begins at noon. Vala kneels on the stone in her new dress of purple silk embroidered with threads of gold. Húni is beside her, a little frown of concentration pulling on his brow. Mýr is a stout, slobby-looking dwarf of at least a hundred and twenty years old, and Vala aches for her sister as soon as she lays eyes on him. His cheeks are flushed from the drink already, and something greasy has spilled down his chin. The grand fur thrown over his shoulders does little to hide the swell of his belly.

But if Freja is frightened or angry, she does nothing to show it. She walks with a brisk, cool detachment, her hand on Father’s arm and her chin high and proud. Even when the ceremonial knife cuts into her wrist, blood oozing, filling her open flesh with ink, she doesn’t utter a word.

During the feast afterwards, Vala notices, she is still tense and quiet. After Freja pours ceremonial wine, Mýr and his new bride sit at the head of the long table, flanked by this newly-bound family. Vala finds it difficult to eat, and she toys with her chicken-leg and listens to Húni and Father talk, whispering low to one another behind emptying goblets of wine. King Vili is whisked away quickly; she hears one of the servants whisper to Húni that His Majesty was feeling unwell. What a shame.

Finally, the couple rise to leave. Húni stops his new brother with a hand on his elbow, and Vala watches him pull a tiny golden key on a long chain out from beneath his shirt. Mýr grins, and some of Vala’s uncles and cousins catcall and whistle and bang their goblets on the table, egging him on. Freja remains vacant and expressionless, saying nothing.  

Vala leaves shortly after, along with Rúni, her aunt Trín and her two daughters, who were staying in the guest rooms on the second floor of their sprawling home. Rúni rides beside Vala in the carriage, bright-eyed and chattering, clapping his hands as he recounts the excitement of the day. Trín’s daughters are thin-faced, colourless creatures, speaking to nobody but each other, and even though it’s so rare to be amongst dwarrows her age, Vala is immediately disinterested in them.

“Good evening, Miss Vala.” A new handmaid is waiting for her in the room, round-faced, pink and plump. Vala freezes in the doorway. “Enjoy the wedding, I trust?”

“Where’s Lína?” She demands.

“Ah, well, Freja demanded just before the ceremony that Lína come with her to the new house. It wasn’t part of the arrangement, but she got quite beside herself, so I’m told. So His Lordship Mýr agreed to cover her wages. Brunhild is a friend of my sister and knew I was looking for work, so she called me in. Bjirna’s my name. I’ll be taking care of you from now on, Miss.”

Vala steps into the room. Freja’s bed has already been stripped bare, and her wooden closet hangs open and empty. All the necklaces and little bottles of scent, and her mirror, too, have been taken away. It’s like she had never been here at all.

* * *

“Put that away.” Signí raps her wooden ruler sharply down on Vala’s table. She jumps, and the needlework falls lax in her hands. “You don’t need to waste your time with that any longer, Miss Vala.”

She raises her eyes. “Pardon?”  

“Get up. And take off those heavy skirts of yours. You’ll need to learn to move.” And with a strange, forbidden type of smile on her face, Signí kneels on the rug before the fire. “You’re an early bloomer. Freja was twenty-three before she had her first blood. She didn’t tell you that, did she?” Ever obedient, Vala shakes her head. Her dress forms a heavy crater of wool around her knees and ankles. “Now. Get on the floor, on your belly. I’m not going to hurt you, silly goose. Don’t look at me like that.” But there’s a softness, a note of reproach in Signí’s voice. She must know what Húni does to her. She’s not as unyielding, not as short as when Vala first met her. The loss of Freja seems to have softened Signí.

“Rest your toes on the ground. Push up on them a little.” Vala complied. “Now, place your palms on the fur.” She craned her neck to look up at her instructor. “I want you to push.”

“Push?” Vala didn’t understand.

“Lift your breast from the ground. Push until your arms are straight, then lower yourself again, until you’re nearly touching.” With a little sigh, Signí bends down to the ground, and shows her. Slowly, gracefully, like a stretching cat, she heaves her stout, stocky body up through her arms, rests again to the point of nearly touching the ground, before stretching out again. “When you can do this fifty times without stopping, Vala, you will be strong.”

Vala nods, a thread of understanding pulling the scraps of confusion together in her head. Is this what Signí would teach Freja, those long afternoons when Vala had been sent away? She thought it would be books and needles for decades; what else was there she still had to learn?

“Hurry up now.” Vala bites her lip, and pushes. She inclines a little, but as she lowers her body, her frail arms give out, and she collapses with a cry on the bearskin rug.

“I can’t.” She wheezes, her arms already burning. “I-I’m not strong enough.”

“Not yet, no.” Signí bends over her. “But we’re going to try, every day, for years if we must. You have to learn how to do this.” There’s a fierce glint in her eye, a curl on her lip. “It’s a hard life for dams in a clan like this. You have to learn to hold your own, Miss Vala. No one else will look after you. Do you understand?”

She remembers the malicious shadows across her brother’s face as he held out that golden key for Mýr. “Yes,” she whispers, brittle and trembling, a solitary leaf clinging to life in an autumn frost.

* * *

The warmth fails to numb her frozen heart. Vala shuffles along the winding path through the foothills. She’s walked this road for near twenty years, but this is the first time she’s ever been alone. The vast emptiness of the world stretches out beyond her, and she feels small and insignificant, a tiny pebble cast into a deep, dark pool with no bottom. She will sink for ever.

 “Lady Vala!” Bjirna calls out, muddled and hazy. Already, her heart is bent in dislike to the simpering, vapid handmaid, her stupid thick braid of dreadlocks that hung crookedly over one shoulder, the dimples on her too-red face, the round, upturned peak of her nose, the way she snores a little in her sleep. Everything about Bjirna annoys her.

Eventually, Vala stops. She squeezes her legs together and waits for Bjirna to catch up, huffing and puffing over the rocks. The thickness of the iron is starting to grow familiar. Sometimes she’s able to forget it’s even there.

* * *

But she can’t ever forget, not really. Vala counts down the nights, curled up in her nest of blankets and furs, listening to Bjirna sigh and snuffle in the dark. Five, four, three, two, one...

Steam rises in the tiled room, as it always has. Vala sits on the stool and watches the maids rush back and forth. Her head throbs, and she tastes metal on her tongue. Cautiously, she dips a toe in. The water is deliciously hot.

The door finally opens. “Vala.” Her brother’s voice is thick and warm, and she fights back the shudder. “Come.”

Bjirna stands against the wall, her hands clasped and her eyes downcast. Signí’s words echo in her ear. It’s true, there’s nobody else to protect her. Everyone else is complicit in this sick play. They watch in stunned stiffness, the way she watched the dam scream and kick out at nothing in the bloodstained ring.

She pulls the shift over her head and approaches Húni with her hands obediently at her sides, as her sister did a hundred times before. Vala closes her eyes, feels a low throb as the lock clicks, pressed close against where Signí said her womb lurked deep in her belly, a promise of life.  A lightness rises in Vala at the moment of freedom, she lifts her legs out and her skin tingles warmly, exposed to the air for the first time in two weeks. She looks down and sees the red lines etched into her flesh, a lingering bruise of what Húni has done.

The water is scalding on her feet, her calves and knees and thighs, but Vala throws herself into it as though the veil of warped, fractured light can hide her body from him. She closes her eyes and allows Bjirna to rub her with soap and cloth, trying, and failing, to ignore Húni’s eyes on her. But she can feel him watching. He will always be watching, she knows, every moment of her life now. Now she’s a danger to his honour, his legacy, his pride. She could break him, tear his ambitions down into shreds.

Vala opens her legs a little under the water, curls her toes and feels the heat swell. A fire of rebellion flickers cautiously in her chest, and she hold her hands over it, nursing it against the bitter winds of lust and cruelty, hiding the light from view.

* * *

A knock sounds at the door of Vala’s chamber. It’s early in the morning, and she’s half-out of her nightgown. “Open up.” Bjirna flinches at the voice, but Vala is still and quiet. “Sister, let me in.”

This is a brutal intrusion. Vala pulls the soft cotton back over her body and sits down on the edge, hands primly folded in her lap as Bjirna unlocks the door. A series of locks and keys both protect and imprison her. “I have a surprise for you.” Húni’s leer is the colour of amber in the weak light. “Tonight will be your first feast.” Bjirna’s head remains bent in dumb obedience. “No more lying in bed wondering what it is we’re up to. You’ll be able to see it all for yourself.”

Vala swallows hard. It’s all she wanted as a little girl, but now doubt gnaws at her stomach. She remembers how Freja would sit so stiffly in the late-night glow, how flushed her skin was beneath her thin gossamer-silk clothes, how she cringed away when Lína touched her. It would happen to her too. The voice drifted through her memory. It wasn’t a threat but a premonition.

Húni holds his hands out, and Bjirna presses a small brass key in his hand without further prompting. He bends over the wooden trunk that remains against the wall, seizing handfuls of silks in a dozen hues. “This one.”  He holds up a skirt of blue, a bodice in a matching colour with geometric gold braiding. Vala bites on her tongue. “It will look good on you, Vala.” He spreads the clothes out on the bed, and bends down to press his lips against Vala’s hair. She yields to him, but can’t resist the shuddering quake deep in her belly. “Be ready at sundown. Everyone will be so pleased to see you.”

When the door finally closes, Vala flops down on the bed, clutching at her squirming stomach. Lock, key, lock, key, lock.

* * *

Vala relates all of this to Signí, who stares with her arms folded, shaking her head. “You’re too young, Miss Vala, and I haven’t prepared you enough, but he thinks you’re ripe for the plucking now, and he wants to show you off.”

“Show me off to whom?” But Signí will not answer. Instead of her usual tests of strength that leave Vala trembling and gasping for air, Signí pulls out a little book with a red leather cover.

“His Lordship doesn’t follow tradition as strict as most, but there’s some protocol to keep in mind. You’re his daughter, and Sir Húni’s sister, and as the only dwarrowdam in the house now, you’re his hostess and cup-bearer. Do you remember Lady Freja’s wedding feast, and how she went through the hall with her jug of wine?”  Signí pushes the book across Vala’s table. “This will be your role.”

Vala frowned. “Pouring wine?”

“Scoff all you like, Miss Vala, but those dwarves value their drink more than the gold in their pockets.” Signí taps the page. “Read on. There’s plenty of wives in the old tales and lyrics who kept house for their husbands. You won’t find a better collection than mine.”

Stories slowly unwind around Vala, stretching their slender, inky limbs and shaking themselves free of ancient dust. Signí has written her notes in red along the margins, her cramped hand at odds with the elegant runes. Names, more than Vala could care to remember, wash over her, soft as whispers.

“Do you see?” Signí speaks up after a time. She’s perched on the edge of her chair, drinking a small cup of tea she’s fond of, one that smells of cloves and cinnamon.

“I think so.” Vala looks up. “Nobody drinks until I bequeath it to them. It creates an order of significance.”

“Mm-hm. You will serve his Lordship first, then your brother.  Sir Húni will signal who is next, I am sure. Watch out for him.”

“Does it really matter?” Vala asks, thoughtlessly. “It seems like such a little thing.”

Signí chuckles into her tea. “Ah, Miss, it is a little thing. But it’s the little things that can cause the deepest wounds to a dwarf’s pride.”

* * *

Bjirna dresses Vala silently. The skirt is tied with a thin braided rope, which the handmaid tucks into the belt. The garment is cut so high; if she lifts her leg high enough, Vala thinks, she could give the hall a glimpse of her iron fangs.

“You’ll need a bit of help.” Bjirna tsks at Vala’s chest. Freja’s old sneer lingers in her mind. “Breathe in, nice and tight.”

Vala is used to corsets now, but this one has no stomach to it, slashed in a deep v-shape down her chest. Bjirna grabs handfuls of fabric, pulling and tugging at Vala’s breasts until the flesh is pressed close together. “You look twenty years older, you do, Miss.” Vala stares at her reflection, at the illusion Bjirna has created. “Now take a seat and we’ll get your face on.” She paints her cheeks pink and her lips red, smears a thin line of black beneath her eyes, and Vala can’t look at herself after that. How is it possible to feel so masked and exposed, all at once?

“Beautiful.” Bjirna presses her palms together and steps back to admire her efforts. “You’re beautiful, Miss. You’ll fetch the highest bride-price in all the Orocani’s.”

A black-eyed, red-lipped stranger stares back at Vala, quivering in terror.

* * *

Húni leads her in by the arm. Vala lingers in the doorway, staring at two dozen dwarves, at their dreadlocks and beards and gleaming, hollowed eyes. Some she’s seen before, at weddings and funerals and grand feasts, and others are completely unknown to her. She feels their collective gaze, lashing at her in whipstrokes of lust.

Suddenly, she’s glad for the belt.

The wine is in a small alcove, Húni instructed earlier, walled off by a screen of carved wood inlaid with iron. She finds a corked barrel, a silver jug with red and blue enamel set in hard, geometric lines resting on an octagonal table.

The wine eeks out slowly, dark and rich as rubies. She’s only allowed to drink on special occasions, and only then, watered down until it’s thin and pinkish. The heady smell fills her nostrils. They used to drink mead, Signí had murmured to her, but then honey grew too scarce, the rolling hills of wildflowers scorched by Easterlings looking to lay crops of wheat, to corral pigs and sheep and cattle.

Vala holds her breath, and steps out into the hall. The laughter dies to a chatter, the chatter to a hum. Her skirts fall open as she walks, the downy hair on her legs gleaming gold. She’s been watching it thicken recently, running her hands over her calves beneath the sheets, feeling the fur shift beneath her hands. Hair has been sprouting up all over, like grass-shoots after a heavy rain, on her arms, her belly, along her jawline and between her legs. It was a good sign, Bjirna had murmured to her some weeks before. It meant that she was growing up.

It was true; there was no imagining that she was a little girl anymore. The eyes on her waist, on the swell of her breasts and the flash of her thighs that rise with each step, proved that. But she keeps her gaze on her father, studying his pale, watery eyes, the quivering line of his lip beneath his grey beard. He seems so old to her.

Vala bends slightly, at the waist, as Signí instructed, and pours the wine slowly, steadily, savouring every drop. She draws back when she’s finished, waits for Father to raise the cup to his lips for a drink. He maintains his shaky gaze, unfocused, staring through her like she was made of air.

But Húni keeps his eyes on her, and his gaze only shifts after his first sip, flickering to the dwarf at his right – an uncle of hers that she’s seen a number of times with a withered left hand from a childhood accident.

She obediently follows his silent command, moving to uncles and great-uncles, cousins, second cousins, close friends of Húni’s that she’s never met. Mýr is here too, and he stares openly, unashamedly, at her breasts when she leans down to fill up his cup. They utter their names as they hold out their cups for her, and Vala remembers only a third of them. By the time she has served wine to the final guest, Húni slams down his empty cup; time for another. Slowly, a trickle of talk widens to a babbling stream, and they grow used to Vala, regard her as a servant, as a particularly attractive piece of furniture. She’s looked at, but not touched yet; the threat of her brother’s wrath shields her from harm.

And it’s different, the way they look at her, compared to Húni’s clinical eye. They’re imagining her naked, imagining taking her to bed, and disgust lurches in her stomach at the thought. She’s learned enough now, from Lína and Bjirna and Signí, from Freja’s veiled insults. Vala knows what she is, what her place will be in this isolated world of iron and fire.

Afterwards, when Bjirna has wiped her face clean and she’s changed into a nightgown, Vala leans against the wall, her legs half-folded along her soft bed, and closes her eyes. The music and roaring laughter still throbs in her ears, and the wine is thick and bitter on her tongue. She’s exhausted. How long – twenty, thirty years of this, until Húni had decided one of his kith or kin was fit to join their family and married her off, to squeeze out infants and hover at the elbow of some dwarf who measured her value as critically as he would an acreage of land or rights to a river-mouth?

If only there was an escape. Vala imagines sneaking up behind one of the servant-girls, knocking them over the head with a candlestick and taking their ragged clothes, sneaking out into the night with a purse of gold, plunging into the unknown. Her heart throbs in anticipation, but as quick as the thought comes, it turns cold and ashen in her chest. She will never do it. Vala is too afraid to stand up to her brother, the way Úni was too afraid to protect her.

Húni would search in her mind for those vile, rebellious thoughts, and burn them out of her if he ever suspected a thing, so she stuffs them down, coats them in a veneer of obedience and fear. No one can see through her intricate camouflage.


	3. Chapter 3

 “Come on, Miss!” Signí is crouched on her knees. “Hold it—Hold it! Don’t you dare fall on me!” Vala pants. She rests on her elbows and toes, her body as stiff and straight as a wooden board, every muscle trembling at the strain. Her vision swims.  

With a groan, she falls slack on the rug. Heaving gasps of air tear at her lungs, and Signí rests on her heels. “Good, Miss. Two-hundred and eighty-three counts. Your best yet.”

“Not good enough,” Vala pants. Dissatisfaction wrenches in her, a self-loathing at her own fragility. She needs to be stronger. She isn’t going to be like Hekyr. “I can do better than that.”

* * *

Vala receives a letter from Úni, slipped in the folds of her freshly-washed shift by an unknown ally. She tucks it into her belt and waits until she’s in the privy to read it, squinting in the gloom.

_They have accepted me into the army. There’s nowhere else I can go, and Víglund thinks it will do me good. He says I’m soft. I’m to wield a sword and shield and axe, and march hundreds of miles and die for a king that has spurned and forgotten me. The others know I’m not like them, that I was nobility and now I’m nothing, and when they think Víglund isn’t around, they mock and abuse me. But it’s nothing I’m not used to. Húni and Father have trained me well to endure humiliation._

_I think about you, every day. It’s a greater pain than I can ever express, knowing that Húni tortures you like this. I beg of you, Vala, please don’t give up hope. I swear, one day, I will save you from him and_

She tears the page in half, and in half again, and again, until her fist is full of paper fragments. Vala thrusts them down the open hole of the privy and watches them fall like dying butterflies, until they’re lost in the reeking darkness.

* * *

One of Vala’s cousins pledges to marry a dam from a friendly household. She dresses herself carefully for the grand feast in a new skirt and bodice that Húni has bought for her. It’s less exposed than the silks she wears for the dwarves, but with the low, low neckline, and the open stomach, she’s still on show. Now she is twenty-five, not of age to be wedded to another, too old to prance about in short-clothes and high collars.

Freja is at the feast too. Vala watches her, pale and pregnant, one hand resting on her swollen belly and the other reaching constantly for her wine as her husband glares up and down the table. She seems sallow, haggard, as though the unborn infant is drawing the life out of her. Her heart reaches across the spit-roasted pig and charred potatoes to Freja, but Vala’s hands and mouth remain still. She knows her sister would not want her love or pity.

There’s music after the food has been cleared, a little dancing. The unwed dams are led away carefully by the hand, blushing and nervous, but Húni lingers at her elbow, a stormcloud that drives the dwarves away.

“Don’t waste your time with them,” he warns, breaking off from sullen conversation with one of their many cousins when he notices Vala staring. “Limp-wristed babes, all of them. I’ll find a real dwarf for you, sister, don’t fret about that.”

“I’m sure you will,” she murmurs, but Húni has already turned away.

* * *

Brunhild comes to see her during an afternoon of instruction. “Well, Miss Vala, it seems it’s time for me to go.” Her smile is weak, faded.

Vala freezes. “What?”

“Rúni is fifteen now. Too old for a nurse, really. He spends his days with his tutor, and he doesn’t need me at night. Lady Freja has written to His Lordship. Her own babe is due in a few weeks, and she’s asked for my services. I’ve known this was coming, and I’m so glad to stay in the family. Oh, don’t screw up your face like that, Miss Vala. Please. It will be all right.”

Brunhild hugs her tightly, breathing against her neck. “You’re in fine hands with Signí.” The oath tickles her skin. “And I’ll never be far away.” But all the same, it’s the closest she’s ever had to a mother, and Vala finds it very hard to let go.

Afterwards, when Brunhild has left, Vala lies down on the sofa and presses a cushion against her face. The isolation fills her slowly, a rising tide beneath the ever-changing moon. Brunhild, the last stalwart is gone, and she feels utterly, utterly alone. Signí sits at her side, a hand splayed out on the cushioning, unsure of what to do. She doesn’t know how to offer Vala that maternal comfort.

* * *

Years pass, dozens of feasts, and Vala does what she’s become so expert at. She listens. The dwarves brag about their wives, their gold, their trade connections, their conquests in the hunt. She feigns interest and laughter, flashes her legs and breasts and the secrets spill indiscriminately from their mouths. Vala weaves every piece of information into a growing tapestry in her mind. Signí has taught her a little of politics and economics; enough to know that the Ironfists face uncertainty and unease, as growing factions wrestle with one another for the favour of an ageing king and his faraway grandson who knows nearly nothing of them.

After she refills the jug behind the screen, Vala raises the jug to her lips for a secretive gulp. The spices of the wine burn in her throat, and she fights to swallow back a sputtering cough. But after she’s refilled the third cup, she feels the soft haze cradle her mind, a soothing blanket muffling the panic that would so often crowd out her senses. Looking back now, she can see that Freja would do the exact same thing.

She learns to disassociate herself from what is happening. Vala becomes a wind-up toy, operating with a mechanical stiffness, with no thought or reason behind it. Their voices rise, become deafening bellows, but Vala remains completely numb to them. Let them look at her breasts and her thighs and her naked skin. Let them see what they want to see. Let them dream of violating her. She’s safe from them, locked away from their touch. Leave them to their gold and their lust, to their treachery and hate and spite and greed. She sees them all for what they are, sees the way they watch her eagerly to see what she would do, whose call for wine she would turn to next, in nervous expectation of her favour.

Such small people, Vala thinks as she downs another heavy gulp of wine in her private alcove. The drink both softens and arms her.

* * *

Vala grows stronger under Signí’s watchful eye. They’re not able to use real swords, but Signí produces a stick roughly the same length, and teaches her how to block and parry and stand her ground against heavy blows. Vala grips a cross-beam in the rafters and is able to pull herself up so her chin touches the wood fifty, sixty, a hundred times. The muscles bulge beneath her skin on her arms and shoulders, and Vala knows she could lift a dwarf over her head, if she had to.

“Very good.” Signí leans back in her chair and smiles, watching Vala collapse bonelessly after counting to five hundred with her body straight as a board, only her hands and forearms touching the ground. “Are you eating like I told you to?”

“Yes, Signí.” Vala rolls over onto her back, panting. “Meat with every meal, and seconds for dinner. Húni says I’ll get fat.”

“I hope you do. You’re getting too stringy.” She stretches her foot out and brushes Vala’s shoulder. But Signí won’t relax her strict regimen, nor does Vala want her to. “Has His Lordship noticed?”

“I’ve seen him looking.” Signí knows he joins her in the bath. “But he hasn’t said anything yet. Does he know what it is you’re teaching me?”

Signí snorts. “He thinks it’s books and needlework and pouring wine. Let him believe that.” Vala watches the firelight dance across the ceiling. “Be careful, Miss Vala. Húni would put a pin in this if he smelled a rat.”

“I know.” Vala didn’t need to be warned about her brother’s possessive jealousy; she wears the evidence of that every day, bound around her hips in iron.

* * *

“What happened with Úni and Hekyr?” Enough time passes for Vala to comfortably ask the question. She’s thirty-four now; her breasts are big enough to spill over her hands when she presses a palm against them. They’re both sitting on the long bench before the fire, Vala with a thick manuscript of history open on her knee, reading, Signí puffing away on a slim pipe of brass and bone porcelain, painted with gold leaf.  “Do you know?”

“Hah!” Signí scoffs. “Fools, the both of ‘em. Thought they could get away with it under his Lordship’s nose. They should have known better.”

“I heard Húni talk once, to Cousin Grómr. He said that Úni had taken advantage of her. He—raped her.” A strange cleaving rips through her chest at the word. She always tries to avoid uttering it aloud.  “I know that can’t be true.”

“Of course it isn’t true.” Signí leans back and exhales a long cloud of bluish-grey smoke. “She seduced him, you know.”

The book falls, completely ignored. “ _No.”_

“Yes. She felt neglected, poor thing. Didn’t you notice how his Lordship started to go cold on her? No, you would have been too young.”

“I did.” Vala remembers the stiff carriage ride on the way to that awful execution. “She would try to touch him, and he’d push her away.”

“Mm, well, Master Úni was always sweet on her. I think it was pity at first. And when she noticed the way he looked at her...” Signí gives her a knowing glance. “Young dwarves like him are so easy. They’re only after one thing.”

Vala is relieved to hear it’s not as her brother claims. But still, it’s hard to believe that Úni would be so stupid. She always thought of him as wise and kind, too careful to make such a thoughtless mistake. Perhaps the loneliness had gotten to the both of them.

“Listen to me, Vala.” Signí turns on the bench, drawing her arm across the back, and leans in. “Don’t make Hekyr’s mistake. No matter how desperate it seems – no matter how awful it may be. It is _not_ worth it. You have to take care of yourself. Nobody else will. Do you understand me?”

Vala nods. That crumpled black skin-paper is still so clear in her mind. She will never forget it. “I understand, Signí.”

* * *

Rúni turns twenty-five, and Father celebrates with a feast. He seems so old now. Vala barely sees him; just at dinner, and at evening prayers, afterwards. He’s too young to join his father’s late-night feasts, and his days are spent with his tutor, learning mathematics and politics and logic and rhetoric – subjects that Father and Húni say are beyond Vala’s feminine comprehension. Fine. Signí teaches her well enough.

Their whole family is invited tonight, even distant cousins that Vala cannot name. Nearly fifty dwarves cram into their hall, tearing into the suckling pigs and lambs and pheasants, the baked sweet potatoes, the thick, hearty pastries and deep bowls of stew that the cooks have spent days preparing. 

Vala serves the head table, a dozen dwarves and dams that Father counts closest to him. Freja watches her carefully, the wine never far from her lips. Vala has heard that she recently had another child – a girl, much to the disappointment of both Freja and Mýr – and she now very rarely leaves the house.

“Are you all right?” Vala asks gently as she leans in to pour her sister wine. She can’t help herself. “You don’t look well. I heard that—”

“I’m fine.” Freja mutters. “Wait.” She shoots her husband a glance, and seemingly satisfied that he is distracted, empties her cup and holds it out again. “Did Father invite the fools to come and dance tonight?” Vala nods. “I’ll meet you in the servant’s alcove when they’re on. Nobody will notice.”

Freja is right – they are lost in a flurry of bright cloth and the delicate playing of little flutes, hidden in the narrow recess that connects the hall to the kitchen’s passageway. “I’ve heard rumours.” She speaks very, very quietly. “Father is running out of money. Have you heard this?”

“No.” Vala whispers. “But I’m not surprised. They just let some of the servants go, and the third cook. I thought we were rich.” She thinks of her silken dresses and her gems, the shelves of books in Father’s study.  “Look at this feast...”

“It’s all a sham. He has to put on appearances, else no one would respect him. Father is in debt to a number of creditors. His investments are failing. And it’s not just him. Other houses are sinking too. The gold and iron, it’s all running out. Trade routes are breaking down. His Majesty can’t even get his share of taxes. More and more dwarves are going into service to try and cover their debts. It’s either that or the poorhouse.” Freja’s eyes slide from side to side as she talks, on the watch for intruders.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because,” Freja says. “You’re the only asset Father has left that isn’t mortgaged to the hilt. Do you understand? Your bride price would be a ton, if you’re lucky. And the longer he waits, the more that dwindles.”  She reaches out, and takes Vala by the arm. Vala jerks at the strange touch, hesitant.  “You need to tell Signí that you don’t have much time, and she needs to make sure you’re ready. I can’t get a message to her.” Freja pauses, collecting herself to launch into another thought, but then the hall erupts in cheers and laughter, in a triumphant woodwind flourish, and with a little gasp of panic, she withdraws and vanishes into the light.

* * *

Dinner is tight and tense. Vala cuts into her joint of mutton, but despite Signí’s command, she can’t eat it. Father is drunk, and Húni sullen and gloomy. Little Rúni (though she doesn’t know why she thinks of him as small, when he’s nearly taller than her) watches timidly, out of the corner of his eye.

“We cannot continue to ignore what stares us in the face.” It’s an old argument smouldering between them, a dull coal that Húni insists on breathing life to just as it’s about to cool. After Freja’s warning, the uneasiness grew more and more apparent over the months, and now the spectre of debt looms over the household. Even Father seems worried.  “Katrín’s son Fræg has amassed great wealth for his family. He has access to trade routes no one else does. We have the blood, but he has what we don’t. Gold, and means to multiply it.” Húni speaks through gritted teeth.

“He could be the wealthiest dwarf in Middle-Earth, and it wouldn’t change things.” Father says. “An alliance with them is beneath us. Money-grubbing upstarts, the lot of them.”

“Father, our gold-hoard is almost gone. We have to do something if—”

“ _Peace_ , Húni. I tire of this. You won’t wear me down with your prattle of merchants’ coin. Katrín sacrificed her position for gold, and she paid dearly for it. I will not allow our house to crumble the same way. There will be no alliance between us and Fræg, do you hear?”

“Then what do we do?” Húni hisses. “The year draws ever closer when Prince Fili will join us, and our position grows more desperate. If you have your way, we will do nothing, and—”

“ _Enough!”_ Vala jumps in her seat, and Rúni’s knife falls to his plate with a clatter. “Do not undermine me, boy. I am still the head of this house. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Father.” Húni retreats, bitter and defeated.

* * *

It’s a special night, Húni warns as he approaches Vala after breakfast one spring morning. He tells her to wear her good clothes, what she wore to Ónarr’s wedding, to make sure Bjirna paints her face just right.

Is it a husband already? The thought lingers in Vala’s mind as she walks down the passageway. She’s twenty years younger than Freja was when she married, but everybody says she’s blooming so early for her age, with her blood and her breasts, perhaps given the financial strain their house was under, Húni had an offer...

She can’t leave it alone, and by the time she is in the front hall, standing obediently at Húni’s side to welcome their guest, sweat has gathered in the tight creases of her body, her armpits and thighs and elbows, and the air feels thick and hazy. The door opens, and on the threshold stands an ageing, grey dwarf, dressed richly, with sapphires sewn into the collar of his long robe.

He looks familiar, but Vala doesn’t know where she’s seem him before. Possibly one of her countless feasts? Mahal, she hopes desperately that she’s wrong. “Fíak.” Húni smiles, takes the dwarf’s arm and inclines his head a little. Father greets the dwarf too, muttering something that Vala can’t quite catch.

“This must be little Vala.” Fíak turns to her, looks her up and down, and Vala obediently bends her back leg and lowers her head, as she’s trained to do. This can’t be a marriage discussion. She refuses to believe it.

“Not little anymore.” Húni rests a hand on the small of her back. “She’s a dwarrowdam beyond her years.” Perhaps it is. Vala follows her father, her brother, this strange dwarf, along the passageway and into her father’s study. It’s already been laid out for this meeting, with her father’s chair angled towards the fire, and two others opposite it. Vala immediately makes for the table against the wall, where a jug of wine rests alongside three golden cups. She knows her place.

Her father, then Húni, then Fíak. The wine is poured, and when they are done, Vala steps back against the wall, in the shadows where she’s most comfortable.  The three of them drink deeply, Fíak and Húni locked in a silent gaze, while her father retreats inward, eyes on the fire. 

“So – our prince is nearly of age.” Vala’s eyes widen in the dark at her brother’s words. No one dares to speak of Fili, their faraway heir to the crown. He’s an ethereal fantasy. “Has he sent word of when he’ll be delivered into our hands?”

“Thorin? Of course not.” Fíak shoots Húni a dark look.

“Do you think he will?”

“Oh, I suspect not.” Fíak says. “We’ll have to fight for him, perhaps even send out an armed party to extract him. Something tells me his mother will be reluctant to relinquish her hold.”

“It’s sealed in ink. _She_ can believe what she likes.” Húni has already finished his first cup of wine, and Vala springs out of the shadows to refill it. “So, do you think His Majesty will send a guard to retrieve him? Does he intent to go along this path? We have other heirs, Fíak. There are plenty of dwarves in this mountain who can lay claim to the throne.”

“Oh, His Majesty knows it.” Fíak mutters. “That, Húni, is precisely why he fights so hard for Fili. He will have no one else as a successor. I think he still loves the boy, in a way.”

“Seventy-nine is no longer a boy.” But a deep, ugly snarl has unfurled in Húni’s face, and Vala shrinks away from it. “We were all wed long before then.”

“The Longbeards are different, you know this. They come of age far later than us.”

“They’re coddled,” Father wheezes from his grand chair. “Sheltered. Always have been.”

Húni ignores him. “So what is the plan for His Highness, then?” 

“When he has been reunited with his kin? I am not sure.” Fíak is careful, precise, and Vala mistrusts him.

“We have always supported His Majesty,” Húni says. Vala notices that Fíak’s cup is empty, and steps out to refill it. “And there are some that consider it a flight of fancy, this faraway prince, no? We hear whispers ourselves, distrust about how a stranger raised from a warring tribe could ever hope to rule us.” His eyes flash, a warning, and Vala is reminded of a crouched spider, waiting in the corner of a dimly-lit room, for the moment to strike. Fíak doesn’t quite answer him.

* * *

A feast is called to honour King Hepti, dead two hundred years and slipping beyond memory. Vala is invited, now she is old enough for the company of dwarves, along with Father and Húni. She’s been to weddings and name-days and funerals before, but never at the palace. A thread of excitement winds through her at the opportunity. 

“You think _she_ will be there?” Húni mutters in the carriage. Vala has heard enough gossip in the feast-hall to know they are talking about old Válka, a dam of nearly three hundred with an iron will and a heart of stone and more grandchildren than one could count on two hands.

“Of course she will.” Father wraps his robe tighter around his shoulder in the winter chill. “With her tribe of girls, no doubt. She thinks if she lines them up in a row, Vili will take his pick like dolls in a cheap shop.”

“Common sluts.” Húni sneers. Vala’s eyes flicker up from her knees. Sometimes, she wonders if Húni hates every dam in the world, even her. “She thinks if she puts them on show, she’ll win Vili over.”

Vala remains a daisy in a field of roses, pale and subdued, eyes on her food. Húni isn't interested in winning His Majesty over. She sits at the high table with her family, perhaps ten or so places along from King Vili, and from time to time, she sees him stare at her out of the corner of his eyes. She’s a mystery to him, to everybody who hasn’t been invited to one of Húni’s raucous feasts.

Válka spends the evening in a sedate repose on the King’s left hand-side, a Queen in all but name. Vala studies the nine dwarrowdams she has brought with her all in turn, with their breasts nearly falling out of too-tight bodices, their cheeks and lips painted red and skirts cut to the thigh. By comparison, she’s a Bride of Mahal.

The mead flows. It’s as rich and honey-sweet, the taste of wildness and springtime. Vala drinks faster than she knows she should, and she’s not the only one. Húni gets drunk, and breaks into a combat of words with one of Válka’s grandsons, slinging foul curses along the table. Tensions overflow, Húni rises to his feet, flushed and furious, grasping for the sword at his hip.

“Brother, no!” Vala is on her feet before she can stop herself, a hand on his wrist. “Don’t— not here. Not with His Majesty.” Húni turns on her, his lips pulled back in an ugly snarl, a beast ready to savage his prey, but his rage softens at her hushed urgency, at her grip, and with a growl in his throat, he retreats.

It’s a strange interaction between them, and Vala thinks about it for a long time in bed afterwards, her thoughts twisting clumsily in her head, sluggish and disjointed. She should have stepped back and let Húni kill or be killed, and suffer the consequences. Mahal, she wouldn’t have his eyes following her, his hands lingering a little too long on her hips whenever he unchains her for the bath.

But she didn’t stand back. Something base and instinctive pushed her on, rose inside of her to reach out to him. Is she really so beaten down and shaped to his will, so doggishly loyal to him? Vala traces her fingertips over the lock on the belt. It shouldn’t be this complicated, she thinks to herself.

But it is.

* * *

An invisible thread seems to wind around every one of them, dragging them closer and closer to the precipice. The air is thick with blood, and the Ironfists become hostile and untrusting of one another. Father says it’s too dangerous for Vala to take her weekly walks, even with the guard, and she’s not allowed to visit the ring. She’s glad of the latter; sometimes she hears their cries for mercy in her dreams, hoarse and dry as a vulture in the bitter wind.

More of the servants are let go, and after Vala bursts out of her fine purple dress, Húni just glares at her and mutters that he can’t afford another. Bjirna mends the torn silk by the fire at night, but it’s too tight to fit her now, and hangs ignored in the back of her dusty wardrobe.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Vala asks one night at dinner. Father has retired early, and Rúni complained of a headache, so it’s just the two of them. “The money. We’re running out.”

Húni looks up from his gristly lamb shank at her. “You don’t need to worry about it.” He says. “Father and I will make sure it’s all right.” There’s an unusual warmth to his words, one that would be considered comforting, had it came from another pair of lips. 

They wouldn’t wait forever, Vala thinks afterwards as she stands nearly-naked before the fire, her nightgown spread over her blanket, lying in wait. The belt itches in the small of her back, and though she tries to use a crochet hook, she can’t quite scratch it.

“You all right, Miss?”

“Fine, Bjirna.” Vala drops down onto the bed, turning the small metal tool over and over in her fingers. She thinks sometimes that anything would be better than this, but each time the thought wanders across her mind, she remembers Freja’s face the day she was pledged to be wed, her stony facade threatening to give way to collapsing terror. What if it wasn’t? Was it better the evil knew you than the vast emptiness of possibility?


	4. Chapter 4

Vala is dressing for bed one night when a sharp knock sounds at the door. Bjirna squeaks and clutches at the key around her neck. “Sister,” Húni murmurs through the wood. “It’s me.”

She bites hard on the inside of her cheek, considering. “Open it.”

Húni enters as though he owns the place, and he does, in a way, Vala thinks. “Get dressed. Something from the trunk.” He smirks. “We’re going out tonight.”

Out? But Vala doesn’t question him. He makes no sign that he will leave, so Vala strips down in front of him, her back turned, and pulls on the clothes Bjirna stuffs into her hands. The handmaid smiles weakly in sympathy, but Vala ignores her. She’s been naked in front of Húni her entire life. He’s stripped her of any sense of privacy and modesty. In a way, she thinks as Bjirna ties her into her bodice and Húni watches her, she doesn’t own her own body at all. Húni has the deed, and she’s merely paying rent to him.

Húni fluently rifles through her wardrobe as she’s being made up, and with a sickening twist in her stomach, she realises he’s been in here often. He knows her possessions intimately. “Put this on.” He holds out her long oilskin cloak with the deep hood. “We must be discreet.”

Outside, Húni takes her by the elbow. “Father’s already asleep,” he mutters as they walk arm-in-arm down the street, flanked by two of their guards. “But the sound of the carriage may wake him. We don’t have far to go, so we’ll walk.”

“Where are we going?” Vala whispers. This is an exceptional night, but it’s dread, not excitement, that’s slowly seeping through her gut. What could Húni be after that he didn’t want Father to know about?

“We’re visiting Fræg.” Vala’s face is still but her hand instinctively tightens into a fist, and she knows Húni feels it. His pace is quick, urgent and sly, and Vala lurches a little to keep up, pulled along by the arm.

“You want to form an alliance with him.” She tries to catch his gaze, but the drawn hood obscures her vision. The thought jolts in her chest and she knows now why she has been invited along. An alliance of marriage.

The house stretches up into the darkness, looming over her. It’s impossibly huge. A guard at the door looks them up and down, nods and lets them in. Servants take their cloaks; Húni is asked to disarm himself and Vala watches as he extracts several long knives from his belt and shirt and lays them out on the table. She longs to take one.

A page boy leads them down a passageway lined with tapestries. The fresh gold thread, the soft richness of the never-washed red fabric, gleams in the light of his lantern and Vala sees her brother sneer. New money; these hangings have no age or history behind them.

“Ah.” They enter a brightly-lit hall with high, narrow windows set with coloured glass, dark polished floorboards and yet more intricate hangings. A dwarf of middling age is waiting to greet them — Fræg, Vala guesses, counting in her head the wealth of the opals strung around his neck. “Húni, son of Túni. And your sister. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you properly.” He looks past her. “Brimir, fetch Frar for me.”

They sit. Fræg and Húni talk to one another, stiff and polite at first, discussing tariffs with the Easterlings, which trade route was the most valuable (the southern route was longer than the west, but it was far safer, and the trail could bear larger carts), the current price of silks and lemons and scents and other luxuries growing scarcer by the season. Vala sits patiently, ignored.

Frar comes after a time. He’s tall and broad and well-built and undeniably handsome, with a honey-coloured beard that stretched nearly to his waist and a broad, only slightly crooked nose. “My son.” Fræg announces, but he needs no introduction. Immediately, Frar approaches Vala, a hand extended, ready to take her.

“Vala.” He presses her hand to his lips in a mannish fashion, and she stands dumbly, not knowing what to think. “Father, may I take her to see the house?”

Fræg looks at Húni, who frowns at them both. “Go on, then.” He finally relents, inclining his head in a slight nod to Vala. With the belt on, he must think, she will be safe.

“Come.” He extends her elbow to her, and there’s little else for Vala to do but take it. She walks slowly, carefully as he leads her through rooms and halls, prattling on about himself, his gold, his conquests on his latest hunt, his skill with an axe and his high standing in the annual tournament, everything she’s heard before from dozens of dwarves just like him. Vala nods and smiles, the way she’s been taught so well, all the while casting her own careful eye over the house.

 “Look.” Frar leads her onto a small balcony off his private sitting-room, overlooking a high-walled square. Moon-crystals have been set into the paving-stones, catching silvered beams through distant slits cut into the rock high above them. Tiny flecks of light are scattered like stars over the walls and the ground. Vala leans over the railing, watching. “Do you like it?”

“Mm.” The sight of such fragile beauty robs her lungs of air. It seems close enough to reach out and touch. His hand falls gently on the small of her back, and Vala is frozen at the movement. The breadth of his palm encompasses her, a massive paw against her flesh. Frar uses the arm wound around her middle to turn her, hold her against the railing. Caged by his heavy limbs, unable to move, Vala holds her breath, clenches her hands into fists at his side.

With no ceremony or warning, Frar presses his mouth against hers. The roughness of his beard against her cheek surprises her, as sharp as the bristle-brush Bjirna would use on the soles of her feet. Vala remains clenched and closed and guarded, not knowing to open up to Frar or push him away. She weighs up both options in a haphazard flurry, her own head spinning at this violent, unknown touch.

The hand on the small of her back shifts, slides around her waist like a snake slowly strangling its prey, moving up, fingertips light against the naked flesh of her breasts, until his hand finds the hollow of her throat, and settles there. He steers her by the neck, guiding her face to angle upwards and meet him, for her mouth to open and invite him in.

A flame scourges her insides, tearing through her chest and belly, leaving her breathless, and a moment of weakness she lowers her defences. Slow, unsure of the movement, Vala gives in to him. Frar robs what little air is left in her lungs, sucking it out of her with that awful great mouth, spitting with rage and arrogance. One of his legs presses between her thighs and bumps against the hard shell of iron and she feels a quiver, a laughter, in his tongue and teeth, a low, animal growl in his throat.

Finally, he relaxes his bite. She feels hollow, withered, as though he’s drained her of blood like a fly captured in his web. Frar chuckles again, his eyes black in the darkness, the half-moon of his face stretched in a petrifying leer. He strains against her, so much might and power in those massive shoulders, those arms she couldn’t encompass with both hands, the heaving muscle of his chest. Against this, she’ll be crushed like a flower beneath the foot of a beast.

Vala stands very still; she has the iron belt, and she tries to tell herself that she isn’t afraid. But Frar looks at her the way the rest of them do, his gaze lingering on her breasts and waist and legs, wishing they could peel off her clothes like skin from a piece of fruit and expose the juicy sweetness beneath.

Frar pulls her closer. There’s a gleam in his eye, a curl in his lip that is achingly familiar to Vala. Immediately, she sees Húni, sees those the same ugly lines of rage and cruelty etched across Frar’s face that she has witnessed so many times before. A soul-wrenching terror encapsulates her, dark and cold as the deepest of winter nights. Is this what she’s to become – another Hekyr, another Freja, beaten and bullied into submission by someone who hates her? All these years of rage and humiliation, of keeping quiet when all she wanted to do was scream, it’s beating against her, raging floodwaters churning against unyielding stone. Only she can’t bring herself to make a sound.

Another low grumble sounds in his chest, wolf on the hunt. He’s already landed the killing blow. Annihilated, Vala remains still, a doe trapped in his jaws, fatally wounded, completely defenceless, waiting for his next move. His claws can’t tear through iron, she tells herself, but it fails to comfort her. Signí, Úni, Father – nobody is ever coming to save her. Nobody can spare her from him. But it’s not time for the kill yet, and with his eyes burning yellow fire, Frar retreats.

“Come,” his voice is very low. “Let us return.”

Frar’s all smiles when they return to the hall, one arm around Vala’s waist, as though they are already lovers. Each step stings, like shards of glass are cutting into her feet. Her blood flows too hot, too fast, and his touch burns against her skin. Frar has already peeled her skin off, flayed her alive, and he’s dragging her half-dead carcass like a toy on a string.

Húni says nothing as they walk home; it is Vala who initiates conversation, waiting until the yellow lights of the sleepy house have vanished from view. “How much did he offer in the end?” She finally whispers, dry, brittle. A husk.

“Seventeen hundred pounds.” Vala swallows. Enough to pay off her family’s debts, to rehire the servants, to get a new carriage, everything that Húni had talked of doing in some warmer, more hospitable time. She’ll never be a counterweight enough for that massive sum.

Will it change anything if she told him what Frar did, if she sketched out the image of that blood-thirsty wolf who only wanted to hunt and rape and murder? Will Húni reconsider throwing his sister to such a beast? It would be worse, she thinks, to have that confirmed, and instead she remains silent, helpless. This is a battle she will have to fight on her own.

He’s vague and shapeless in the darkness; a presence, a distant warmth. The urge to reach out to Húni prickles along her arms and she heaves in self-disgust.  How can she fall into pieces so quickly?

* * *

Signí is cautious when she hears about the secretive meeting, and brings out another thick little book, this one with a plain black cover. Inside are careful drawings in ink of couples in bed with one another, with frank instructions. Vala reads silently, wide-eyed.

“The more you know, the easier it will be.” Signí urges. “Keep him happy in bed, and he’ll be kinder to you. Understand?”

Vala stares at the page. “I think so.” The dam sits in the dwarf’s lap, her arms around his shoulders, balancing on his hips. Does it hurt? She wonders. It seems such a little thing in the drawing.  So at odds with Frar’s raw, masculine strength.

* * *

Six months pass, but still Vala remains unclaimed. She gathers from the soft whispers and glances that Fræg’s bride-price was neither accepted nor denied. It isn’t Húni’s decision to make, not yet. She’s still beholden to Father, who will never accept such an alliance as long as he lives. The weight of all that gold hangs ominously over her head, bends her shoulders and neck and leaves her aching. For now, she’s spared. She doesn’t see Frar or his father again. Sometimes, she lies in bed and thinks of him, one hand drifting to her lips, to the place on her throat where he had touched her so tenderly. But it’s all a sham; Frar just wants to take from her, use her for her blood and her body, to fill her up and then hollow her out, over and over. They only met once, for a brief hour, but not for a single moment during that fiery meeting did he even ask her a question, speak _to_ her, give the impression that he cared for her. It sounds a warning deep in her breast. 

A letter turns up one night, pressed deep between her bedsheets like a wildflower in the pages of a book. Vala hooks it between her toes and waits until Bjirna is snoring before she crouches in front of the fire.

_Sister, I’m heading west with Fíak. He’s selected a hundred of us. We’re to take Prince Fili back for ourselves, by whatever means necessary. Even if we have to kill Lady Dís and King Thorin, we’ve been instructed to do it. It’s strange to think that the dwarf we take will become our king. Part of me hopes that perhaps Durin’s folk have shown him a different way. Father always said that Longbeards were greedy and stone-hearted, that they cared only for gold and brought a dragon upon their heads for their hubris. He is blind to his own hypocrisy._

_But who knows. Perhaps Prince Fili will lead us down a different path. Perhaps things will change when he takes the crown. Don’t give up, Vala. We just have to keep hoping that_

She crumples the letter in her fist and watches it singe and blacken in the fireplace. It ignites the old memory, of something best left forgotten, to fester in the dark. “You’re a fool if you think it will change,” Vala whispers to the burning ink. “We’re all doomed.”

* * *

Servant-boys call out in the streets and knock on doors at breakfast time. Vala and Rúni both watch as Húni attends to the message, and returns white-faced to the table.

“His Majesty is unwell.” He murmurs. “They believe he will not live.”

When she meets Signí for her lessons, Vala finds that she already knows. “This only means you must work harder, Miss.” She says, low and urgent. “Time is moving faster. His Lordship is one of the strongest contenders for the crown. He has been gathering allies at his feasts. Surely you’ve noticed this.”

“Of course I have.” The pieces are coming together now, but Vala knows her brother is hamstrung. He can’t land his killing blow yet. “Húni wishes for a union with Fræg’s house, to weave peace between us with me and his son. Father will never let it happen, but... he is old.” Vala slowly teases out the thread, a nasty snarl in the complicated tapestry of her family’s affairs. “And he diminishes further with every winter. Do you think that Húni is waiting for...”

“I won’t speak ill of Sir Húni.” But she doesn’t need to; the darkness in Signí’s gaze is warning enough.

* * *

For a dwarf who has lived as long as King Vili, his illness is comparatively short. Not two weeks since the servant-boys first banged on the door of their home in the square, a low, sombre bell tolls in the night, and Vala lies in bed and listens to the low moan of strangers wailing in grief.

Even Bjirna is roused by the distant sobs. She sniffles a little, thoughtlessly devout, but Vala is dry-eyed and still, sitting with her legs spread out beneath the blankets. This is just the beginning.

She dresses in a long white gown recovered from the bottom of an old trunk that Freja once wore, and leaves her dreadlocks unbound to hang to her waist. Vala is putting her maidenhead on show. After a month of mourning, the funeral begins. Vala walks beside Rúni in the procession, and does her best to look stately, aware of the hundreds of eyes on her.

Freja attends the mourning-feast with her husband and three daughters. So close in age; Mýr is obviously desperate for a boy. The girls are dressed in virginal white like Vala, eating carefully to avoid getting their clothes spoiled. She catches Freja staring at her once, but her sister averts her gaze when she realises Vala is watching, and doesn’t look in her direction again.

She sees Frar too, staring openly at her unbound hair, at the tightness of her white gown over her breasts, at the jut of her leg beneath her flowing skirts. He’s already claimed Vala, she can see it, and she rails silently against his far-flung dominance. Vala makes a promise to herself that he will never break her, digging red half-moons into her palm as she grips her dinner-knife. She imagines thrusting it deep into Frar’s flesh. If only she could keep it.

There is no declaration of who will be king next. Everyone waits for it until midnight, but none of King Vili’s advisors dare rise to their feet. Vala watches one of them, old Onyrr, who once touched her backside at one of Húni’s feasts, approach Father and bend down to talk in his ear for a long time.

“What’s going to happen?” She asks on the carriage ride home. Rúni is asleep, leaning her shoulder. Father’s chin is drooping onto his chest too, but Húni is sharp and alert. “What did Onyrr say? Is Father putting in a claim for king?”

“Not yet.” Her brother mutters. “Fíak has been sending letters every day. They have found Prince Fili in Erebor, the dragon slain and the gold unclaimed. No others in the Orocani’s know of this yet.” His eyes flash at her; a warning.

“Does that mean he’s not coming?” Vala whispers. Why would anybody choose this miserable pit over a gold-hoard fabled to outweigh the wealth of the entire Orocani ranges many times over? Why would Prince Fili return to this mountain that meant nothing to him, when he was so safeguarded in the home of his ancestors? But Húni looks away, and will not answer.

* * *

Two weeks later, dinner is interrupted with the arrival of Onyrr, wrapped in a dark fur-lined cloak against the winter chill. Húni jerks his head, and instantly Vala is at attention, pulling back a spare chair and pouring a cup of rich, heavy wine to warm the old dwarf’s chilly body.

Onyrr downs the cup in a single draught, and holds it out for Vala to refill it, his gnarled hands shaking a little. “King Thorin is dead.” He finally says. Húni’s hand drifts to his golden beard. “He fell in battle after orcs ambushed their mountain home, alongside twenty of our own kin. Prince Fili has been crowned King Under the Mountain.”

“How can he be king of two tribes?” Rúni pipes up, thoughtless and forgotten. Húni shoots him a glare, but it is ignored.

But Onyrr humours the dwarrow with a little smile. “That, Master Rúni, is a question we’re all asking of ourselves.”

“So it’s over, then. He’s abandoned us. Good. He was never fit to rule our kind, blood or no.”

“Not quite.” Onyrr’s eyes swivel to each of them in turn. “You remember the second, don’t you?”

“The bastard boy, Kili.”

 “Shameless.” Father growls. “Shameless of her, to call him that.”

Vala sits down slowly; the dwarves are satisfied for now. “Not so, after all.” The flicker of a smile vanishes, and Onyrr is stern and serious. “Fíak wrote at length of him. He will be leading their return party to the mountains. Fili has assumed himself king of both the Ironfists and the Longbeards, and will rule them together.”

“Together?! How can he rule from a world away?”

“He is opening Erebor’s doors to us. There is gold and room for both tribes, Fili claims. Kili is coming to invite the Ironfists west, to migrate to the Lonely Mountain.”

Húni laughs, but Father is stone silent. She studies them both, wondering what it means. Erebor. The word is foreign in her mind. “He can’t imagine that will ever happen,” her brother says. “It’s a flight of fancy. Who does he think he is, a bastard boy with no ties to us, telling us what to do?”

“There’s more to Kili than we think.” Onyrr says. It’s ominous, heavy with subtext.

“Oh? What of it?”

“One detail we got wrong; he’ll be seventy-eight in the spring. By our count, the dwarf was sired in the Orocani Mountains, before she left. And Fíak claims he’s a living picture of _him._ ”

“That lying bitch.” Húni snarls through gritted teeth. “She let us believe, and all this time...”

“Whatever plan you have in mind, I suggest you move quickly.” Onyrr lifts his half-empty wine-cup to his lips. “The Ironfists are divided between three. The time is most ripe for another to come in and assume dominance over us.”

“One dwarf won’t change things.” The light throws strange shadows over Húni’s face, and he seems withdrawn, almost ill. Vala knows this is a terrible blow for him.

“Fíak has warned that we not underestimate Kili. Have you heard the story?”

“I have,” Húni mutters, “but tell Father.”

“Very well.” Vala leans in a little, a strange anticipation slowly rising in her belly. “It happened early in the dwarves’ quest from Ered Luin to Erebor. Kili got himself kidnapped by a gang of goblins, and wound up in the possession of Azog, the orc-king who—”

“I know who he is. Dís mentioned him one night when she was drunk.” Father mutters. “Go on.”

“Well, Azog didn’t kill him, obviously. He kept Kili prisoner for months, chasing Thorin and Fili through the old Greenwood. Kili eventually killed Azog, and reunited with them, but word is something changed. He’d gone wild. He ran away from them again, and ended up with a tribe of orcs in the Grey Mountains. Went willingly. He turned in the battle for Erebor, claims to be loyal to Fili, but according to Fíak, some reckon he’s more orc than dwarf now. He’s not right in the head. Feral.”

“Huh.” Father grunts, staring blearily into the fireplace. “Sounds like him, all right.”

“Who?” Rúni asks, entranced.

Húni slams down his empty cup, and Vala springs to her feet, reaching for the jug. “Nobody, son. Don’t think any longer on it. I don’t care who this Kili is, or what he’s done. He’s no challenge for us. We have our own ways of dealing with him.” His eyes meet Vala’s as she leans over to pour her wine, twin pools of blue, and she realises for the first time how vital she is to bringing his plans to fruition. Without her, he’s nothing. She revels in the secret power for a moment, bites back her smile of victory, and merely nods in return, humble and demure. Onyrr tells them other stories about Kili too, stained in blood, of impossible strength and razor-sharp wit. He’s clearly a threat.

“What will you do about Kili?” Vala asks afterwards in the warm sitting-room off the hall, when Onyrr has left, and Rúni has been taken up to bed and Father sits snoring lightly in his chair by the fire.

“I’ll kill him.” Húni shrugs, as though it is merely a minor annoyance, but Vala can sense his unease.

“Onyrr said that Fili has promised terrible consequences if harm comes to his brother. We are to be his allies.”

“Allies to whom, sister?” His eyes narrow. “A dwarf who hasn’t stepped foot in this mountain for nearly eighty years? One who was never even born here? What have they ever done to prove they are one of us? Why should we show a shred of loyalty for them?”

“King Vili—”

“Hah!” Father jerks at Húni’s voice, and the snore punctuates, but returns, soft and wheezy. “An old fool clinging to a dream.”

“You can’t say that about him.”

“I can say what I like.” His lip curls. “It’s nobody’s place to admonish me, Vala, least of all yours.” She’s overstepped, and cringes back a little at his challenge, her head bent and hands in her lap.

“I will deal with him.” Húni says. “It doesn’t affect our plans. In fact, this might play into our hands. You’d be surprised how many people will be happy to unite with close enemies against an outside other.” He stretches his legs out, and the pair bob gently on a slow current of silence, ebbing further and further apart.


	5. Chapter 5

She is bathing when it happens. Húni is sitting as he normally is, on his low stool against the wall, his hands in his lap as he watches her expressionlessly. A knock on the door destroys the brittle silence, and Bjirna squeaks and drops the lump of soap into the water. Vala fetches it, thick and pale and slippery.

“What is it?” Húni barks at the door. “We’re busy!”

“Sir Húni,” it’s one of the maids. She’s crying. “Please— Please you have to come, now.”

Freya pulls on her shift over her damp limbs, her hair dripping into the white cotton until it’s transparent and clings to her skin. The belt is abandoned, lying on the floor of the tiled room, and a strange chill whistles through her thighs as she runs, wet and exposed. When she gets into Father’s room, Húni is already there, sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand holding his, his head bent, the golden dreadlocks shielding his face from view. Rúni is standing before the fire, his hands clasped and his teeth gritted as he tries so desperately hard not to cry.

Father has been dressed down to his underclothes, his shirt buttoned open. Vala feels strangely disconnected from her own hands and feet as she crawls across the bed to sit opposite her brother, watching the stuttering rise and fall of his bony chest, scattered with wispy grey hairs.

“What happened?” She finally asks, eyes locked on her father.

“Some sort of turn.” The maid’s voice is thick. “He started coughing blood, shivering like he he’d been in the snow for hours. He’s not woken since.”

After a time, the instructor comes and takes Rúni away, a healer comes in with a bag of innumerable concoctions, and so too a priest with a little grey-covered book, and some of the servants leave, but Vala and Húni remain, each holding one of Father’s hands. She can feel the life flow through them, one to the other to the other, an unbreakable chain forged in blood and bone. He is dying; they both know it. The breath rattles in his throat, loose and empty, and the skin already seems to have collapsed on his hands, turned an odd greyish-purple, stiff as stone and cold as ice.

Deep in the night, another spasm rocks his frail, ancient body. The healer jumps up from his seat by the fire, shouts at Húni to hold him down while he jams foul-smelling herbs against his nose, but Father coughs and chokes. The priest stands at the head of the bed, reading rapidly from his book, a little stone token dangling from his hand in silvered chain, swinging back and forth. Blood flies from Father’s mouth, thick and red as garnets, splattering against the healer’s face, and Vala shrinks back, hiding behind her splayed hands. All of a sudden, Father arches his back, rises up, and a terrible groan echoes through the shell of his destroyed body. Then he falls still against the bed, his eyes half-open and mouth slack, and Vala realises with a numb ringing in her ears that he is gone.

Húni takes her back to the bathing-room, locks her back into the belt and robs her of that brief, tantalising freedom. Bjirna already has the white gown laid out for her, with the waist taken out so it fits her. They’ve been preparing for this, she thinks as Bjirna laces up the back, staring at her infant-pink hands, still smelling of oils. They knew this was coming.

“We’ll begin the mourning.” Húni speaks later, sitting on the bed beside her, a hand on her shoulder in a weak gesture at comfort. Vala nods, staring at nothing. “An embalmer will be here the day after tomorrow. He will help us dress the body.” He already speaks of Father like a discarded object, a failed investment that’s no longer worth his time. “His affairs were all in order. Everything’s left to me, naturally. I’ll let things take their course until the mourning is over.” But then?

“What about Frar?” She has to ask. This is what Húni has been planning for over a year now. With a low throb in her stomach, Vala realises now that Húni never wept or showed grief or anger over Father’s dying body.

“In time.” Húni says, crisp and sharp. “Don’t worry about that, sister. It will be in motion soon enough.”

Then she is left on her own, and finally Vala is able to cry.

* * *

Freja arrives the next day, dressed in her mourning robes of a wife, a dull slate-grey with her arms and breasts covered. Two servants trail her, bearing trunks of clothes and furs; for the month of mourning, Vala’s sister is coming home. Mýr will reclaim her after the funeral. Brunhild carries the youngest on her hip and leads the other two in a daisy-chain of flesh. “Oh, darling.” She murmurs when she sees Vala in the sitting room, presses the infant into Freja’s arms so she can wrap her old charge in a fierce hug. “Shh, now, shh. It’s all right.”

Vala doesn’t cry again. She stands in the achingly familiar comfort of Brunhild’s arms longer than she knows she should, unable to step away. But something feels bent, diminished, in Brunhild’s posture, the curve of her shoulders, the slope of her back. She seems to be shrinking in on herself, losing some of her old strength slowly as the years grind down on her.

Húni is busy, but Rúni plays games with his little nieces, his voice gentle. He’ll beat it out of him soon enough, Freja mutters, already halfway through a cup of wine. She doesn’t need to say who.

 “You holding up?” Freja asks after a long time, haggard, hunched in on herself as she curled around her wine, as precious as a pearl.

“I—” It’s inexpressible. Mother was lost to her in birth, but Father is an absolute. Was.

“Mm, I know.” Freja looks over Vala’s shoulder to the dwarrows, and her face softens slightly.  “He didn’t deserve to go like that.”

After the children are taken up to bed, it spills out. “I received a note from Úni.” Vala has to tell somebody, why not her? Freja will keep this secret. They’re sisters, it has to count for something. “He’s part of the army that’s been sent to take Prince Fili from the West. He’ll be coming back, with Prince Fili’s brother.” Freja stares at her, stone-faced. “What?”

“You can’t trust Úni,” she warns.

“No, it’s all a lie, Freja. All that rot about how he forced himself on Hekyr. He didn’t do that at all.”

“Oh, _that_.” Freja scoffs. “Of course he didn’t. Mahal, she was all over him for years.”

“What?”

“Húni was bored with her well before you were born. She kept miscarrying. Must have had four or five, most of them pretty far along before it was all over. Poor Hekyr. She was so broken about it. Húni thought it was her fault. He was _vile_ towards her. “

“I had no idea.”

“Of course you didn’t. There’s a lot you don’t know.” Freja tilts her head back in a heavy swallow of wine. “Úni was the only dwarf in this house who didn’t treat her like dogshit. So of course she fell for him. They used to go off together, make me stand guard for them. You know,” her lip twitches. “I think Rúni’s his.”

Vala stiffens. “ _No._ ”

“All I know is, she couldn’t carry a babe to term for over a decade, and then less than a year after taking up with Úni, she finally pops one out. Awfully good luck, no? Húni didn’t know they were carrying on then. He thought it was all recent, when he found out. He’d probably drown Rúni in the bath if he knew.”

Vala’s not so sure. Húni’s always been a distant father, and this makes her wonder if he carries his own suspicions, keenly aware that this is his only heir, unable to act on them. But it doesn’t explain that strange statement. “Why do you think I can’t trust Úni?”

“He’s a coward.” Freja says, simply. “Hekyr told me, he made all these promises about how he was going to take her away, that they’d live together, it was all being set up. She was so fucking desperate to be rescued. But Úni never did it. He didn’t have the mettle, in the end.” She shoots Vala a look. “He couldn’t do it for her. What makes you think he’d do it for _you?”_

* * *

The embalmer, an elderly dwarf with whiskers that stick out like wires and thin, twitchy fingers, leads the dressing ceremony. Freja and Vala do most of the work; Húni stands against the wall with his hands balled into fists, eyes oddly bright. It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking.

They drink together during the long, quiet nights, the three of them, after the dwarrows have been taken to bed. Vala pours wine for her siblings, who sit facing one another in stiff-backed chairs before the fireplace. Father’s chair still takes pride of place, imposing and empty, and Vala can see her brother’s eyes fall on it more and more as the days pass.

Brunhild warns that grief does strange things to people. Vala watches Húni whenever she can, studies the flicker of his eyes, the movement of his hands, the way the tendons on his tattooed wrist flex and curl with a spasm of emotion. But there’s nothing out of the ordinary there. He seems to have accepted Father’s death the way some would a shift in the weather, the turning of a tide. The world has to move on, with or without him, and he will make the best of it on his own.

“Has he talked marriage?” Freja asks one night, after Húni has left them to their own devices. She stretches her leg out, golden-brown in the firelight, the hair as pale as straw. “Surely he’s thinking about it. The funeral will be ruining him.”

“He has.” Something has changed in Freja in the twelve years since marriage. She’s less haughty and dismissive, more willing to listen. She hasn’t quite warmed to Vala yet, but there’s less of a chill in the air between the, a softening of the frost. “He— He already had an offer.” The stretched leg falls limp. “Frar. Son of Fræg. Son of Katrín. You know him?”

“The old King Hepti’s cousin. Mýr’s said some things. They’re supposed to be stupidly rich.”

“I suppose they are. They offered seventeen hundred pounds.”

“ _No._ ” Freja sits straight up. “Seven _teen?_ Mahal! I only went for six hundred.” She huffs a little, put out. “Did he say yes?”

“Not at the time. Father didn’t allow the union. He forbade all contact with Katrín’s kin, you know that.”

“Seventeen hundred.” Freja seems vacant, faraway. “Do you wonder if Father was— if it wasn’t just a sickness?”

Cold realisation drips through Vala’s body, along her spine. “You’re not saying...”

“I would never. But that’s a lot of money, and Húni always gets what he wants, in the end.”

Vala lies awake in bed for hours after, her fingertips tracing the lock on her belt, fidgeting in childish familiarity. She doesn’t want to believe it, but she knows that Húni is capable of anything. He murdered his wife and crippled his brother for a slight against his honour. In a way, nothing about Húni surprises her anymore.

What more would he do in an attempt to obtain a fortune? Her flesh moves restlessly across her bones; a quiver of fear. What would he do to _her?_

* * *

The mourning-feast is held in the temple, not at home, and Vala is exhausted, a wrung-out old rag by the time it’s over. She dozes lightly in the carriage home but before she can go upstairs, Húni beckons her to follow him into his study.

“I’ve invited Fræg and his son to visit us tomorrow.” Húni stands with his hands clasped behind, gazing into the fire. “We’ll formalise the betrothal then. I hear that Frar is anxious to cement the match.” Vala says nothing. “Tell Bjirna you’ll have your bath early, in the morning.” The servants will be up in the wee hours running coal-buckets and pumping water, not that he cares. “That’s all.” Húni looks carelessly over his shoulder; a strange, closed expression has spread across his face. It looks like a mask. “Go to bed. It will be a long day tomorrow.”

But she doesn’t go yet. She stands before the closed door to Freja’s chamber, where she sleeps alongside her husband. A hand rests on the panelling. But what’s the use of going to her for help? Freja would just sneer and roll her eyes, say that it’s time, that Frar has been kept waiting long enough for his proposal. There’s no comfort there, and Vala turns away.

She snatches a few hours of restless sleep before dawn, and then lies awake listening to the distant clatter of maids in their labour, her stomach knotting painfully until she thinks she’s going to vomit. Vala can’t shake the memory of being trapped in those massive paws, the heaving strain of his body. She refuses to submit to him, but terror stretches its long limbs in the pit of her chest. He’ll utterly dominate her, she knows this, and she won’t have any choice but to surrender to him if she wants to survive.

Did Mother feel the same way, lying in her bed in that old-forgotten time, the taste of Father’s name strange and bitter on her tongue? Did Freja’s chilly haughtiness finally crumble in the loneliness of the night, waiting for the dawn when Mýr would brand his name on her wrist? It all seems so circular. Vala lies on her side, curls in on herself and feels the iron pinch at her thighs. Her fingernails bite into the bedsheets with a flush of rage, but she’s as toothless as a newborn kitten in this house. What hope does she ever have of defeating her brother? 

* * *

Vala watches Frar every moment she can through the feast, feeling his eyes rove over her body, slowly slicing her up, tearing her apart like a fine cut of lamb. Húni is drunk and uncouth, as he is so often, and Frar and Mýr match his debauchery. Húni warns her off the pork-belly, saying she’s getting too plump for her own good, but Frar just smiles, eyes locked on her as he says he doesn’t mind a dam with a little meat on her bones, something to hold on to.

“He’s just a brainless pig.” Freja leans over to murmur in her ear when the dwarves are occupied with some filthy joke. “Could be worse.” She’s so defeated, so resigned to the idea already. Vala wants to scream. What is wrong with her? What is wrong with all of them? How could they submit so blindly to this, unwilling to even think of another way? She clutches her eating-knife under the table, rubbing her thumb over the smooth curve of bone, and imagines going from one to the other – Húni first, then Frar, then Fræg, severing tendons and arteries, leaving the air bubbling wetly in slashed throats. Desire crawls along the back of her hand. If only Húni didn’t count the knives before the servants took their plates away.

But it’s only a flicker, a flame in the rain, and Vala pushes it down. How could she ever forget the sight of Úni’s twisted, broken body, the smell of Hekyr burning in the fire? It rings a low, sombre warning. Was it worth it though, to only survive and to never live? Vala watches her sister eat slowly, her jaw tight as Mýr’s hand drifts down her back, his fingertips brushing her thigh. But what’s the alternative? The image of the dam in the ring, her bare feet swaying from side to side, still comes to her, sometimes, in her dreams.

At least Frar doesn’t try to corner her alone again. She’s thankful of that. The droning on of marriage floats above her, indeterminate and distant as a spring mist in the mountains. Vala catches fragments of speech – the odd name, a day, a place she’s been to once – but it all seems the words of a foreign language.

“Four months, Miss Vala.” Bjirna beams as she dresses her for bed. “And not a whit too soon, I say, with all this uncertainty ‘round these parts.”

“Is that how long?” Vala whispers. But Bjirna just smiles, misunderstanding or misbelieving her.

* * *

The days slip through her fingers, a handful of pebbles snatched from a riverbed. Signí sits her down, and is frank and coarse in her description. It’s going to hurt at first, she warns, and there’ll be a little blood too, but in time she could learn to like it. Some were lucky enough to derive just as much pleasure as the dwarves did, and if Vala didn’t, well, there were other ways. She went through those, too, a wicked gleam in her eye. 

Vala listens, red-faced, with downcast eyes. “Have you?” She blurts out one day. “I know you’re not married, but— but you know so much. How did you learn about all this?”

“I had a little fun when I was a girl, but not for years now,” she says. “All this natter about dwarves wanting wives pure as the driven snow – it’s all rot, really. They want a dam who knows what she’s doing. Only _they_ want to be first, too. So that’s why I’m here. Sir Frar will get the best of both worlds, when I’m done with you.”

“What if I don’t want to?” Her fingers stretch out, clawing desperately at nothing. Signí’s eyes remain fixed on the book spread out beneath them on the bench, at the drawing of a damn on her hands and knees, her back arched like a cat and her face twisted in pain or pleasure, it was impossible to tell.

“You don’t get much of a say, Miss.” A strange sharpness has come over her, and she looks every inch the cool instructress Vala first laid eyes on all those years before. “He’ll take it, whether you like it or not. So you best make the most of it when you can.”

* * *

The horns sound; a clear, sharp noise that cuts through the squirming thoughts in Vala’s head. She abandons her book and scrambles downstairs to the front hall, where Húni has already flung the door open, standing with his arms crossed. Beyond the throng of guards that bar the door, she catches the rare glimpse of a crowd, the hubbub of chatter rising against her.

“What’s going on?”

“Prince Kili is here.” Húni’s lips are pulled back from his teeth, slowly yellowing as his middling years beckon closer. “With Fíak.”

There’s a feast – the entirely of the court is invited. It’s supposed to be a coming together of the Ironfists, a celebration of the past, an anticipation of the future. Húni scowls and mutters but tells the messenger-boy at the door the three of them will be there. “Wear the purple.” He  snarls at Vala as he slams the door closed.

“I—I don’t fit it anymore.”

“I said you were getting too fat,” he leers at her. It’s strength, not softness, that has caused the seams of her gown to burst, but Vala says nothing. “What about the burgundy? With the gold braid? I paid three pounds for it; don’t you dare say you’ve spilled out of that too.”

Vala draws in a sharp breath. “No. The burgundy is fine.” 

* * *

They’re guided into the feast-hall, one of the last families to arrive. The head table is empty; murmuring talk bubbles and rises in anticipation to a shout. Then, the doors are flung open, plunging the hall into silence. Vala rises to her feet alongside her brother, craning her neck for a glimpse at this wild stranger who has come, Húni says, to destroy them.

Kili leads the chain of dwarves, dressed for war beneath a silver-furred mantel. His shoulder-length hair is unbraided, dark as scorched wood, his beard perhaps as long as her little finger, his eyes dark and ever-moving. He’s not particularly tall, or broad, but a strange sort of power seems to emanate from him, in the rigidity of his shoulders, the briskness of his stride. Vala realises in an instant that he won’t take orders from anybody, and he will allow nobody to get the best of him. 

His followers file past – a very, very tall dwarf, taller than she’s ever seen, with tattooed hands the side of dinner-plates and a nasty red scar across the side of his balding head, a comically smaller, almost child-like figure with straggling orange hair, another with his dark hair elaborated combed and braided and fixed with silver clasps, Fíak, and _Úni_. She senses rather than feels Húni tense up at her elbow, but doesn’t shift her gaze from her brother, a soul she hasn’t seen in twenty years. He’s older, less softened than in youth, with a new solidity set into his features.

“That bastard.” Húni spits in her ear. “The rumours were true. He’s grovelled into that brat Kili’s favour. I should have known he would degrade us like this.”

“Does he know about Father?” She asks, unsure of where to look.

Húni sneers at his brother. “Does it matter?”

There’s a brief speech, and then servants rush to bring food, the joins of meat still hissing from the fire. The room smells of grease and smoke. “He keeps looking at you.” After a time, Húni breaks from low, uneasy conversation with Mýr to mutter to her.

She doesn’t look. “Who?”

“Úni. He can’t keep his eyes off you.” His lip curls in hatred. “He must want something.” Of course he does; he wants to talk to his sister for the first time in twenty fucking years. Vala bites the curse back. “Get him alone. Find out what he’s after.”

She nearly chokes on the mead. “What?”

“Find his angle. If he really supports this boy Kili, or if he’s out for his own skin, or what. You’re the only one he’ll talk to. Pretend you still care about him.” Is this a test? What is he playing at? “Hurry up; we won’t be here all night.”

Vala drains her mead-cup and rises to her feet. Yes, Úni is looking at her from the head table. Kili is too; she finds her own gaze sliding from her brother to that dark-eyed stranger, his thin face and strangely gentle brow, pulled close in thought. He seems so quiet, so unassuming. How could all those stories about him be true?

There’s a small room to the side, a balcony that overlooks the courtyard. Vala jerks her head towards it, watching her brother carefully to make sure he has seen her, before turning her back on him. The air is a little cooler out here, less wet from the lungs of a hundred other dwarves. She breathes it in slowly, running her palms over the railing worn smooth after centuries of lonely dams like her, holding on for solidity and meaning. But she isn’t like them, Vala tells herself, staring out in the darkness, punctuated by tiny orbs of orange candlelight. She has her inner fire, more precious than a thousand clusters of diamonds. She will never, ever give up.

Her hands tighten at approaching footsteps behind her. “Good.” She murmurs, taking the sound to be her brother, and turning. “I thought—”

It’s Kili. Her throat closes and she watches him come closer, examining new details – a thin scar stretched like a silver thread across one cheek, from beneath his ear to the curve of his cheek, a hollow in the base of his neck between two jutting bones, small braids half-buried beneath the nest of his dark hair, the shadows of grey beneath his lashes. All this she takes in slowly, knowing that moment that he is doing the same to her. But it’s different to how the dwarves look at her during the feasts, undressing her with their eyes, imagining the sensation of pressing against her flesh. It’s different to Húni’s cruel, calculating stare, taking her apart piece by piece, holding her up to the light, measuring her worth. He’s curious. No one has ever looked at her like this.

“Where’s Úni?” She finally whispers, unsure of what to call him.

“Inside.” He speaks, a softer voice than Vala had expected. “I wasn’t going to let him come out here alone.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know you.” He takes a step closer, stretching his hand out to grip the railing, a foot or so from hers. Vala doesn’t move. “I don’t know if you’re a friend of his or not. Who knows what could happen to him?”

She doesn’t know how to answer that. Vala pauses, wonders how to ease herself out of this. “He’s my brother.”

“Húni is your brother, too. They’re bitter enemies; are you friends with them both?” She feels so exposed. Vala looks down at his hand, so close to hers, remembering the story Onyrr had told about how Kili had bent and broken steel with just his fists. It’s only a rumour, she tells herself, battlefield bravado. It can’t possibly be true.

Everything rises up inside of her slowly, a spark catching to a flame, the flame a roaring bonfire, searing her bones. Every rebellious thought she’s ever had, every compulsion to take the poker from the fireplace and run it through her brother’s chest, to push Húni into the marble bathtub and hold his head beneath the water, to tear at his throat with her bare hands, it all rises and rushes together. The memory of him breathes on the back of her neck, a chilly rush of frost-bitten wind, fear pushing back against the roaring hatred, and the air falls still in her lungs, every word dried-out and dead.

Vala can already see exactly what Kili thinks of her, watching her so closely. He sees a poor, abused, broken little thing, too beaten-down to fight back against the tyrant who dominated every aspect of her life. It’s wrong – it’s all so damn wrong, it’s not like that at all, but every defence and challenge shrivels up in her mouth, dissolving into ash. Something inside of her, that same rush that made her reach out to Húni and draw him away at the feast for Hepti, is staying her hand. She’ll cut it out when she knows what it is.

“Úni said you were locked up.” Kili speaks again. “To avoid a repeat of what happened with Hekyr. Why are you walking free tonight? What changed?”

“Free?” A laugh bursts out, unbidden. “You think I’m _free?_ ” The heat surges again in thoughtless anger, and something inside of her breaks down. Vala grips his wrist, pulls him towards her, and guides him along the inside of her thigh, where her skirts fall open, outwards. Kili’s eyes widen, and a knot pushes in his throat, a heavy swallow, but his hand remains obediently still, curious, unknowing, somehow strangely innocent. Has he ever touched a dam before?

“Does this feel free?” She keeps her eyes locked on his, pressing his fingertips hard against the metal teeth that are so familiar to her, testing their sharpness. He stares back, ignorance rising to shock, his shoulders jerking in a sharp intake of air and his hand tensing up beneath hers. “I’m not free.” Vala drops his hand, and limp as a dead fish, it falls to his side. She can see the red gleam of blood, but if he’s in any pain, he refuses to show it. “Don’t you ever say that to me again.”

Vala pulls away before he can respond; she doesn’t want to hear what he has to say to her, some weak platitudes, some offer of help. It’s worthless. He may be a savage, this Kili, wild as the rain, he may have poured armies of blood over the rugged hills of the west, he may have committed some of the most brutal acts known to his people, but when it comes to the Ironfists, she realises, he knows nothing.

 “That wasn’t Úni.” Her brother snarls as she reclaims her seat, pale and shaky. “What did he want with _you?_ ”

“He wanted to know if I was Úni’s ally.” She finally says, hiding her hands beneath the table. They won’t stop trembling.

“What did you say?”

“What do you think?” Vala summons up a few scraps of courage, worn down to tatters. “I didn’t say anything.” What else can she tell him?

* * *

Húni calls a solemn dinner, filled with the dwarves of his family — uncles, cousins, in-laws. They sit in a ring of chairs in what was Father’s chamber, which Húni has already claimed for himself, listening intently.

“We have to move quickly.” Húni doesn’t even wait for Vala to finish pouring the wine. “You know what last night was — a warning. We must act quickly to solidify our place in these mountains. As you all know, our sister Vala has been betrothed to Frar, son of Fræg, son of Katrín. Royal blood flows through that house, and though they no longer have the grace of the nobility, their gold-hoard outweighs all except the royal coffers.” His eyes gleam. “The bride-price is handsome, seventeen hundred pounds. You all know how that would strengthen us. And with Frar as one of our house, we would have access to his own connections to trade-routes, his allies and partners.”

“Your father disavowed the union,” old uncle Baldr growls, thrusting his hand out impatiently for Vala to fill his cup. “He forbade even the mention of it.”

“Father is with the Makers.” Húni remains flat, an empty page on a half-finished manuscript, waiting to be filled in. “He no longer has dominion over this house. I do.”

“And you would insult his memory—”

“I am preserving it.” Baldr falls silent. "What would you have us do, uncle? Fall into ruin? Shall we sacrifice our sons and daughters and grandsons for the sake of one dwarf's shame?" He rises from his chair and walks around the room slowly. "We must do what is needed to survive. We are Ironfists, Mahal." He curls his own, holds it out, the tattooed tendons stark and trembling on his wrist. Vala can’t look at him. “When did we ever give up this easily?”

He tries, but Húni is defeated. He sits in his chair, slumped and bent after the others have left. Vala perches on the edge of her bench, hands clenched in anticipation of his anger that she knows will turn outwards, onto her.

“Fools.” He spits in the stifled air. “The lot of them.” Vala knows better than to speak. “They’ll come to the truth in time. They have to. I won’t let Kili defeat us for the sake of mere proprietary, sister.”

“No.” For when has propriety ever mattered to him?

* * *

A message comes in the morning, stamped with the royal seal. “It seems I’ve been invited to a private audience with the boy Kili.” Húni throws the letter down on the table. Vala watches him silently. “I’m allowed to take a single guest. No weapons. His own guard will escort us.”

“Do you think it’s a trap?” She asks. Would Prince Kili be so bold as to murder his greatest challenger from the safety of the castle?

“Perhaps.” His dark look drifts from the discarded paper to her. “Does the red bodice with the golden flowers still fit you?”

Vala sits very still. “Um, yes.” She hasn’t worn it in years but she’s sure she can make it fit. She’s terrified of denying.

“Put it on. It makes your tits look good. And wear a skirt that shows a lot of leg. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

“I—Am I going?”

“Don’t be a dunce, of course you’re going.” She sees right through him. Vala isn’t a confidant or advisor, but a bauble, a bird to dance in front of Kili like a jealous cat, just out of reach. The thought sets her teeth on edge.

* * *

The page-boy leads them through the main hall, beyond the grand courtyard for royal guests, and up, up, up, a winding passageway deep in the heart of the palace. “Prince Kili has taken the eastern wing for himself,” he says softly, almost apologetically. “His Majesty’s royal suite was not to his taste.”

They’re invited into a circular room at the top of the stairs, a turret with a sharply-pitched roof, lined with books with three chairs set out just so. Kili is already waiting, and if he’s surprised to see Vala, he doesn’t show it. But Vala sees the way his eyes fall on her breasts, almost naked in the too-small bodice, and from the chuckle in the base of Húni’s throat, she knows her brother has seen it too.

“I’m glad to see you took my offer.” Kili says as he sits down. “I’ve been eager to speak with you, Húni.”

“Out with it.” Húni snarls. “What do you want from me?”

Kili smiles; he must have expected this. “I want this transition to go as smoothly as possible, for my brother’s sake, and for your people’s, too.” His eyes narrow slightly in warning. “There’s no point in shedding blood over this.”

“So _you_ come here, the bastard son of a princess none of us asked for, the brother of a king that is a stranger to us, thinking you have the authority to dictate your will. As far as we’re concerned, King Vili’s line has ended. You are nothing.”

“I’m not a bastard.” Stronger dwarves have cowered before her brother’s biting rage, but Kili is strikingly calm. “You know I’m not. I’ve seen statues of Vili inside these walls. And even if I was, it doesn’t change my place in my mother’s line. Fili is my brother. I’m not here to rule you, Húni. I’m here to speak on his behalf.”

But Húni is cold, disbelieving, and Vala knows he may lash out at any moment. “What is the price? What do _we_ get, if we play along with your game?”

“Fili has made an offer for you.” Kili reaches into his pocket, brings out a small square of paper.  She can see the red mark of a wax seal. “If you pledge allegiance to his name, if you come in peace to Erebor, and bring your kin and allies with you, then he will reward your loyalty. Handsomely.”

“How handsomely?”

“Fifty thousand pounds.” Vala’s breath catches in her throat. Seventeen hundred is such a pittance alongside it. “You can divide it however you wish among your family, but you must be responsible for keeping them allied to our cause.”

“Fifty thousand pounds.” Húni repeats. “For our loyalty.”

“Fifty thousand pounds. No more, no less. Fili considers this more than fair.”

“What of my brother?” Vala’s eyes slide along to Húni, hands clenched in her lap and her knees pushed tightly together. “How handsomely are you rewarding his loyalty?”

“He hasn’t asked for money.”

“No. He wouldn’t.” Húni leans back a little in his chair. He’s trying to seem aloof and disinterested, but Vala knows his mind is racing, scrambling to plot his next move. What is it Úni wants? There’s no greed, no ambition there. Úni’s so simple. He doesn’t long for wealth or fame or pretty dams. He never did. There’s only one thing he ever wanted. She wonders if Húni knows it as well as she does.  

“You don’t have to give me an answer now.” Kili’s looking at Vala now, a snatched, almost longing look, one she doesn’t know quite how to pick apart. His eyes are so dark in the firelight. Vala finds herself watching them, reading the glimpses of truth in his guarded expression, his clenched jaw and the slight crease of his brow. What has Úni told him of her? What picture has he formed in his mind? “I’ll give you time to decide.”

* * *

“You’re not going to say yes, are you?” Vala waits until they are in the carriage before speaking.

Húni sits with his elbows on his knees, his dreadlocks loose and wild over his shoulders. He looks up from his hands, face set in a heavy snarl. “What the fuck do you think?”

* * *

Now that the offer has been made, Húni is bound, by his own pride and greed and blood-lust to reject it. He holds a dinner for the dwarves of their house, and she listens silently as they debate the money, feel the imaginary weight of it in their empty, hungry hands. They are split in two – whether the gold is taken or spurned, half of Vala’s kin will read it as an insult.

“We must move fast.” Vala stumbles, slops wine over the sleeve of cousin Bolgr. He frowns at her. “Once we reject this offer,” for there is no other option on Húni’s mind, “we must cement the alliance between our house and Fræg’s. It’s the only way we stand a chance.”

This time, a little more of the room is in agreement. Then Húni begins again. They talk and talk, until the wine is a trickle from the barrel, until the fire is in embers and the roasted duck is picked down to bones. Vala aches with tiredness, eyes swollen behind her lids, feet inflamed and throbbing, when her reluctant, acquiescing uncle Baldr is finally led off into his shabby carriage, stumbling and tipsy in the greying light of dawn.

“A month. We can string Kili along until then.” Húni announces to the empty room. Vala sinks into the nearest chair, rests her elbows on the table. “I’ll invite him to a feast, play the ally. Say that we’re considering things. Tonight.”

Vala lifts her head a little. “Tonight?” She echoes faintly.

“Get some sleep.” His snarl softens, so minutely, and for a moment Vala believes he might care for her. “I need you on your toes. Kili isn’t stupid. The moment he suspects a thing, we’re sunk. Go on.”

She’s too tired to complain, to even think about what her brother has just said. “Oh,” he stops her in the doorway. Vala looks over her shoulder at him. “Úni will be here too. So keep your head.”

Her heart throbs deep inside her chest. “Of course.” 


	6. Chapter 6

Vala doesn’t want to be a pawn. Tiredness seeps into every crack and crevice of her body, but she can’t sleep. She rests her cheek against one of the bedcushions, recalling the way Kili’s eyes widened as he brushed against the most innermost, private part of herself, the way a knot bobbed in his throat as he laid eyes on her in that low bodice. Signí’s warning rings in Vala’s ear, pushing softly against the curve of her skull, unfurling. Don’t make Hekyr’s mistake – but what choice did Hekyr have? What choice does Vala have? To waste away in this miserable house, silent in her passive terror, as Frar’s wolf-claws bite into her, clench tighter and tighter until he’s strangled the air out of her?

There is no keeping her head down. No placid silence. Not anymore. Every time Vala closes her eyes, all she can see is the long, lonely years of her life stretched out before her, a solitary road, a track, winding through haggard, barren mountains, slick with wind and sleet and rain. Brunhild, Freja, Úni, Father – everyone has left her, left her alone with her bastard of a brother who caged her like an animal, who stripped her down, broke her apart, claimed every piece of her for his own, wrote his name on it.

Maybe Hekyr was in the same place. Maybe she saw Úni as a handhold to pull herself out of her life. Maybe she didn’t love Úni at all – just the idea of freedom, at leaving her cold, imprisoned life behind. At leaving Húni behind.

But Úni was a coward. Vala watches the firelight on the ceiling, tracing the edge of the belt, where it bites into apex of her thigh. And she can’t trust him either. Even if Húni is killed, there’s no freedom for her after that. There’s only one way out of her family. One way to escape the net.

And anybody, surely, would be better than Frar.

Hatred creeps along her spine, hatred at herself, at what she’s reduced to. Seducing dwarves to get her way; what would Freja think? But she can’t do this alone, and she can’t depend on anyone else to save her.

Vala crawls out of bed and pulls her nightgown over her head. Naked apart from the disgusting, intolerable belt, she bends down to look at herself in the mirror. Two eyes, two ears, two breasts, two arms, two hands, two legs, two wrists, two feet. Who is she? Who is Vala? What the fuck does that word even mean? The glass is so cold against her fingertips.

“I’m going to beat him.” She whispers. “Whatever it takes. I’m going to make sure Húni never wins.” 

* * *

Kili and his retinue – the massive dwarf with the tattooed hands, the little redhead, the one with massive, bushy eyebrows and a cunning face, and Úni – are right on time. Húni and Vala invite him into the feast-hall, where a few of their kin wait already, with uneasy eyes. Two dozen of his own soldiers, the King’s Guard of Vili, follow. They outnumber their own sentries, and Vala can see that Húni can’t stop watching them out of the corner of his eye.  

“Let us break bread together,” Húni gives a cold smile that seems strangely fixed. Only his mouth moves; everything else is still as a dead fish. “It’s only fair we get to know each other a little more before we agree to an alliance.”

Kili sits at Húni’s left hand. Is he nervous, Vala wonders, as she approaches the table with her full jug of wine. She pours first for her brother, of course, of course, and watches carefully. His gaze flickers to his right for a moment, to her brother-in-law, Mýr at his elbow, but Vala ignores him. Rebellion stirs in her stomach, the barest of embers, and with her breath bottled up inside of her, Vala can’t help but stoke the flame. The vague outlines of a plan, one that has been drifting gently in her mind, taking shape throughout the day, solidifies.

The room is silent as she fills Kili’s wine-cup, careful not to spill a drop. Their eyes meet for just a moment; something strange seems to crawl across Kili’s face, a flicker, a spasm, so brief she wonders if she had imagined it. “For our honoured guest,” she murmurs, as though it could absolve her. Vala makes her way along the table slowly, to her own family first, then along to Kili’s kith and kin, until she has to shake the last drops from the inlaid ceramic into her brother Úni’s half-empty cup.

“That was a bold little stunt you just pulled.” She jumps at the voice behind her, concealed behind the screen as she drains wine from the barrel. Vala doesn’t need to see Húni’s bitter rage; she can picture it so clearly in her head. So familiar. “What game are you trying to play?”

“You want me to be the ally.” The jug is so heavy. If she were to smash it over Húni’s head, would it kill him? An image dances in her mind’s eye, of blood and wine flowing freely into one another, of a white glimpse of bone. Her fingers curl around the handle, aching to try. “So I played the ally.”

“ _Look.”_ Húni seizes her by the elbow, spilling wine over her naked thigh. It gleams against her gold-threaded skin. “Don’t try and be clever. Keep your head down and shut up. Let me do this, you hear?”

“Don’t you get it?” Vala hisses back. “He likes me. You said so yourself.” Mahal, it’s such a dangerous game to play. But isn’t it worse if she sits back and does nothing, if she lets her brother tear her apart? “Don’t you want to keep him on our side?”

Húni watches her carefully; it’s that same look she knows so well, so calculating, so suspicious. But he can’t see through the imprint that he’s left on her. When he looks at Vala, all Húni can see is his own deeds, his own desires, his own pride and greed. He has no idea who Vala really is, and in that moment, she’s completely unknown to him. So he lets her go, not knowing, not understanding, with that sick little twitch of his lip, so familiar to her.

“You want to play this game, do you, sister?” He pulls at the neck of his clothes, and Vala catches the barest glimpse of gold beneath the layers of fur and leather. It’s deliberate, she knows it. Bastard.

“I’ve been playing for years. Haven’t you noticed?” She shifts her weight to one side, accentuates the curve of her hips. Does he think of her sometimes, at night, when he’s with his servant-girls? The thought lurks in a quiet place deep within her, unbidden. She’s afraid of the answer. “I’m not a little girl anymore.”

The night wears on. Vala learns the name of Kili’s friends from the west – Dwalin, Nori, Ori. They say little, and keep to themselves and to Úni, who seems to know them all well. It’s only after Húni makes an offhand comment about their grandfather’s vast library upstairs that Ori, shy and silent, withdraws a little from his shell and asks exactly how large it really is.

“Vala will show you.” Húni grips her by the shoulder, thrusts her forward. “Go on, sister. It’s too precious to leave abandoned. And,” he leans in, whispers very softly against her hair, “word is, this dwarrow is Kili’s closest friend and advisor. Find out what you can.”

So she takes a candle and bids him to follow her, wordlessly. There’s no flicker of fear at being left alone with a dwarf, even in a room as solitary as the library. Ori is so young-looking, so small. Vala is certain she’d beat him in a fight, if it came to that.

“How do you find our home so far?” She does her best to be welcoming. Ori, a little bewildered at being dragged away on his own, hesitates before opening his mouth.

“Different,” he finally says. “It’s— It’s not Erebor or Ered Luin at all.”

Vala tries, but is only able to drag colourless, stumbling answers out of him. He’s been told to keep his mouth shut. She wonders how best to crack him open as she opens the library door, lighting the dusty old lantern on her dead grandfather’s desk with her candle. Sickly yellow flames lick the dusty glass, sputtering and uneasy.

“Oh.” Ori turns around and around, his eyes wide. “There must be at least five hundred books here.”

“My grandfather was a collector.” Vala sits on the edge of the desk, one leg crossed over the other. “Do you like what you see?”

“ _Amazing._ ” Ori picks up the nearest, rifles through it. Damn, she was hoping he would look at her. “There was no library left in Erebor, Smaug burned it all. Fili’s talking about rebuilding it, but there’s so much more to do first. These are beautiful.” Ori holds a delicate illumination up to the light, examining the faded reds and blues and greens on the page. “Beautiful.”

“Take it, if you like. Húni doesn’t care for books, and I only read when I’m bored.” Which, actually, is a lot of the time.

Ori lifts his head to look at her. “Really? Úni said you always used to sit and read with him, for hours.”

“My brother told you that?”

“Mm-hm.”

Vala leans forward, slides off the desk and onto the creaking floorboards. “What else did he say about me?”

Ori bites his lip, caught. “Oh, bits and pieces. He said you were so young when he last saw you. It drives him mad, that he can’t talk to you now. Kili won’t let him.”

“Why?” Vala seizes at the thread, pulls at it with her fingernails. “Doesn’t he trust me?”

“I... It’s not that.” But it is, in a way. She can tell by his reluctant unease. “It’s...” Ori closes the book and turns away from her, sliding it back onto the shelf. “He wants to make sure you are who he thinks he is, first.”

The confession burns on Vala’s tongue, but who knows who might be listening through a gap in the floor, a crack in the floorboards? Húni has spies all over this house, and Vala knows she is never free, never safe.

“Is it true Prince Kili betrayed his brother?” Ori runs his fingertips along the withered leather spines on the shelf as he listens, leaving a smear in the dust. Can he decipher her code? “That’s the story I heard.”

“He betrayed all of us, but none of us blame him for what he did. Someone else got inside of his head, filled it up with thoughts that weren’t his.”

“But he trusts you now.”

“It was a hard-fought battle. But we won him back.” Ori extracts a thick octavo bound in dark green leather, smaller than his palm. “May I take this one? I’ll return it when I’m finished.” But Vala isn’t look at the book. She watches Ori, the way his hazel eyes dart around, feeling for the crevices where an enemy may be hiding. Mahal, she’s felt the same way for so long. 

“Of course you can.” Vala smiles. “You’re an honoured guest.”

* * *

Úni must be drunk, when she returns. His cheeks are flushed and eyes bright and he can’t stop looking at her again. When she bends over to refill his wine-cup, he snatches her by the wrist, holds her close and leans in. “Vala,” he breathes, tentative, cautious. “Mahal, I’ve waited so long to speak to you. Are you all right? I-Is he hurting you?”

Vala glances down the table; Húni is turned away from them both, talking to somebody else. “Let me go, brother.”

“Listen, I promise you, I’ll get you out of here. Kili’s promised he’ll help me. No matter what Húni does, we’ll protect you. We’ll—”

“ _Protect_ me?” Vala snatches her arm back. “How the fuck can you protect me? Why do you think I want it?”

Úni falters. “I—I’ll make sure that—”

“You’ll make sure what?” A tightness is building in her chest and she realises that she never forgave him for what he did. In her youth, she thought it a violent, indefensible act of cruelty from her brother, but the more she looks back now, the more she realises how much of a fool Úni was. 

“You abandoned me.” She leans in closer, keeping her voice very low. “For _her._ You knew what you were doing was wrong. You knew if Húni caught you, he’d try to kill you both. Oh, I know it was her making,” she heads him off as he opens his mouth to speak. “But you didn’t have to say yes to her.”

Úni draws back from her, stunned. “I loved her.”

“What about me? What about Freja? You left us with him!” Vala can see from the corner of her eye that Húni is watching her. She has to put on a show now, to convince him of her loyalty. At least, that’s what she tells herself. “You’re a fool and a coward, Úni. You have dreams of, what, rescuing me? Well, I don’t want it.” She sneers down at him, shakes her head, and lifts the jug once more. Her heart is pounding as she turns away and deep inside, Vala reaches out to him all the same. Yes, he’s a fool. Yes, he abandoned her, but she knows that right now, Úni – stupid, impotent, powerless Úni – loves her more than anyone else. He is the one person in the world who would lay down his life for her sake.

Vala thinks her little show would have put Kili off, but still, he watches her. Vala feels his dark gaze fixate on her as she walks along the room, pausing to pour wine, to listen in to a particular story or joke. He studies the way her shoulders tense up in strained laughter, the way her hands clench at the occasional stray touch. More than once, their eyes meet over the bent heads of Vala’s kin, and when he realises he is caught, Kili looks away, a little muscle working in his jaw. Perhaps she was wrong about him in the beginning. Perhaps he realises that there is more to her than she will ever let on. Or does he just want to fuck her, like everybody else?

Fíak’s warning resonates in her head, whenever she’s close to him. Feral. Not right in the head. At first, she imagined something like Frar, in his brutal savagery, but Kili’s more calculated, more steady than that. Vala can’t ever see him exploding in a violent rage the way she imagines Frar would. He is perfectly in control of his emotions.

No, Fíak meant something else. She sees it now. Kili is beyond sense and feeling. It’s been stripped out of him with a near-surgical accuracy. Ever word is measured, considered, before it’s uttered. There’s no reaction to anything Húni says. The only time he seems to waver from his controlled calm, his detached observation of the world around him, is when he lays his eyes on her. It’s going to be so easy to make him hers. The wine-jug feels slick against her palms at the thought.

Sometime after midnight, Kili throws back his chair and declares it is time to leave. In forced politeness, he thanks Húni for his hospitality, proclaims it the beginning of a great friendship. And he takes Vala’s hand, his fingertips against her palm, his thumb pressing on a great blue vein that runs over the back of her knuckles. She feels the throb of blood, a pulse, and wonders if it’s his or hers. He smiles when he says he’ll see her again soon.

“He’s well-armed, I’ll give him that.” Húni says afterwards, looking thoughtful, distant. “I got a word in the ear of one of his guards. He’s paying a pretty penny for their loyalty. More than we could hope to afford.”

Vala says nothing. He’s not looking for her input. “But only weak hearts are swayed merely by promises of gold. We may yet lure some of them to our cause.”

Something uncomfortable stirs in her stomach at the plot. “Will you ask Prince Kili to come again?” She envisages something more private, perhaps a repeat meeting of just the three of them. Could she handle that? Could Kili handle himself, if needed?

“In time. We have another engagement first.”

* * *

After a few days, Vala learns what this means. There’s a set of games planned a week from now, Húni reveals, held not at the ring, but at an underground combat hall he knows of. Kili has been invited; it’s an annual Ironfist tradition.

“I’ve never heard of Lausatök.”

Húni scoffs. “Of course you haven’t. Unmarried dams aren’t permitted to go. But Frar is competing, and you’re already betrothed. There’s no harm in you coming. Frar will be pleased to show off his skills to you. He’s very good.” And he wants to put her on show.

Mahal, the sands are falling. She’ll belong to Frar soon, trade out a house, a set of servants, a cruel and dominating dwarf, for another. What’s the better option? Freja thought it was so easy to decide, but Vala isn’t sure. 

“Hah!” Signí rolls her eyes as Vala tells her. “The sport of drunken fools. They wrestle like beasts in the dirt, trying to knock one another over. Most of the entertainment is betting on one another to win.”

“You’ve been?”

“Years ago.” Vala snatches at this gem of information and squirrels it away. “So, you’ll be the bride of a competitor, or good as. You’ll get a nice seat, and other dams will be waiting on you all night. May as well make the best of it, Miss Vala.”

* * *

What does she ever do, other than make the best of it? Vala sits silently on the edge of her bed as Húni rifles through her things, trying to find a dress that still fits her and shows off the right amount of skin. “Here,” he holds out an old bodice with no sleeves at all. She’ll freeze, but of course, he doesn’t care. “Bjirna, find her the right gems to match.”

“Yes, m’lord.” She remains downcast until he leaves, then claps her hands together, alight. “Oh, Miss, you must be _so_ pleased. I’ve heard such stories. And you’ll finally be able to see Sir Frar in action. Won’t it be exciting?”

Vapid bitch. Vala grits her teeth, forces a smile. What else should she expect from her? She’s been filled up with their lies, like any of them. Bjirna has had to dissolve herself in order to stay alive.

They’re silent in the carriage. Rúni had whined and said he wanted to go, that it was unfair that Vala could be taken out and he couldn’t, but a sharp blow from Húni put an end to it. Húni’s hand is splayed open now, resting against his knee. Is he disappointed by his son, Vala wonders as they trundle sluggishly through the quiet streets. He seems to be a child. She’s kept at arm’s-length from her nephew. He’s so distant, and it’s impossible to know. They’re never alone together. Húni seems afraid that Vala will tempt him in some way, or that they will form some kind of friendship, and alliance that Húni can’t control. Perhaps, deep down, Húni suspects that the boy may not be his after all, but it’s the only heir he’ll he ever have.

Until Vala is wed.

“Frar will be in the ring, of course, so stay close to me.” Húni walks with an arm around her waist as they enter the hall. “They should know to keep away from you, but you can’t be too careful.”

“Of course.” She can hear the music, the roar of laughter, the cheers and jeers and violent hum of the crowd as they make their way down the dim passageway. The room is brightly-lit, almost searing, large and square with a wide white circle painted on the ground. Raised seating made of wood to fit perhaps eighty throngs the scene, half-filled already. The dwarves outnumber the dams two to one, and the curious eyes of strangers linger on her for a moment. Then they see the hand on her, a warning, a mark of possession, and retreat.

“How many fights will there be?” Hopefully she gets to see Frar beaten into a bloody pulp. Hopefully someone will kill him.

“The field of thirty-two will fight one another, winner fights the winner, and so on. Usually takes most of the night, with a show in between. Settle in, Vala.” And he already has, stretching out on his cushioned seat in the front row and raising his finger in a request for wine.

When the seats are full to bursting, and Vala is pressed between her brother and Freja, who only looks mildly surprised that Vala was there, a bell sounds in the passageway.

“How long have you been coming here?” Vala asks in her sister’s ear when she gets the chance.

“Ever since I was married.” But Freja is moody and aloof tonight; she seems to be brooding, her mind somewhere else. Maybe she’s pregnant again. Vala will get no companionship from her, so she leaves it alone. Kili is one of the last to arrive, his small retinue in tow, and with a thrum in her chest, Vala watches him take a seat exactly opposite her. An invisible line stretches across the ring, binding them both together.

“Your competitors!” An elderly dwarf booms, and Vala tears her eyes away from Kili to watch. Thirty-two dwarves, including Frar, stripped bare to the waist and flushed already from the heat and excitement of the night, strut in a brief parade. As he passes her, Frar breaks out of the line and seizes Vala in a deep kiss. Still and utterly helpless, she lets him, as the cheers and catcalls screech around them both. He’s already given over to bloodlust and passion, she realises as he pulls away, his teeth bared. Mahal, what if he wins?

What if he loses?

It’s brutally violent. Vala expected the flying fists, but not the nails and teeth that tear at flesh and hair and draw blood. Some are over quickly, as one dwarf topples the other and casts them on their back. Others drag on, until the fighters are gleaming with sweat and spitting out loose teeth and struggling to see through blackened eyes. There are no rules she can discern – just get the other over the line. She watches with her nails biting into her palms as Frar beats his first opponent, and his second and third. A dance-play fills in the time as the final eight retreat to clean up the blood and rest their weary limbs for a moment. Vala ignores the fools and instead watches Kili, who is sitting very still, inscrutable.

“What do you think, sister?” Húni leans in to murmur in her ear. “Your husband-to-be is impressive, is he not? He won the last, and the year before was a close match.”

What is she supposed to say – she’s impressed by this show of cruelty and violence? That she can’t wait for the day those same hands are laid on her, in anger and hatred and passion? That she’ll happily sit here, year after year, as he beats dwarves down and occasionally kills them?

The final eight become the final four, and then the final two, and after a long, protracted battle of fangs and claws and twisting limbs, Frar stands victorious. His victim had managed to bite into his ear; blood trickles down his heaving chest, and bruises mark his forearms already, but Frar simply roars, ignoring all of it, his arms clenched, raised in victory to the ceiling as the crowd rise to their feet in cheers and shouts.

Vala reluctantly stands, knowing that Frar’s eyes are on her, and assumes an air of pride and joy. Mahal, she’s going to marry a monster. He’s going to rip her into pieces if she ever so much as looks at him the wrong way. Vala can taste his rage tonight, bitter as vinegar, thick as oil.

She needs air. It’s choking her now, and she tears away from Húni, caught up in the moment of victory and briefly ignoring her. Vala pushes through the mass of bodies. This house is utterly foreign, and after she enters the passageway, Vala stumbles blindly through the dimness, her fingertips grazing the wall, navigating turns and stairways and sharp corners and locked doors.

Mahal – all she can see is the way Frar held that dwarf down, even after he had won, his hands around his neck, squeezing and squeezing until four others jumped in him, tore them apart and declared him the victor. All she can hear is the desperate, gurgling rasp of air, the roar of the crowd to finish him off, the thudding of her own heart within her. Arrested by the threat of his brutal fury, senseless in her bid to escape from him, she pushes on. How the fuck can Húni just _sell_ her to this monster? How can her sister just _sit_ there and watch so heartlessly, with no murmur of sympathy or concern? How can they all just egg him on, like he was a trained bear tearing apart a hapless dog for their own damn entertainment? How can any of them let this happen?

Vala tries a door, and the latch gives way. She flings herself inside, closes it and gropes about in the darkness for the shape of furniture. Finally, her hands brush against the edge of a long bench, and she flings herself behind it, the air still weak and shaky in her lungs. Those bastards, every single one of them. She can still feel the push of crowd against her, the roar of pain and passion, the smell of swear and ale and wine and tobacco and Mahal knows what else.

How long she remains sprawled out on the ground, gasping for air as the terror claws at her chest, as the stone began to warm beneath her flushed, quivering skin, Vala doesn’t know. A strange stillness seems to come in the fading of the panic, from exhaustion or resignation, or both. They’ll be coming for her soon, and they’ll be so angry. Húni will be silent in his smouldering rage but the moment they’re alone, just the two of them, he’ll unleash his fury. He’ll say she humiliated them, that she caused such a fuss, that she embarrassed Frar in front of his kin and his rivals both, that she threatened their facade of support and unity for Kili. Perhaps he’ll hit her. Or worse. All of this drifts through her mind, bitter and vicious, and she can’t force them out.

The door creaks. Vala’s hands curl in the braided wool of the rug, and she holds her breath as a beam of light falls along the wall behind her. It’s eye-searingly bright. “Vala?” A soft whisper fills the room.

Kili.

“Are you in there?”

“What do you want?” Kili swears under his breath at her voice, pushes the door closed again, and she can hear his soft, fumbling tread through the darkness.

“Your brother is looking for you. So is Frar.” His voice drifts closer, closer, until she can feel his warmth. “I didn’t know you were betrothed to him. Húni doesn’t want to be allies, does he? He wants to join with Fræg and Frar and defeat me. Tonight was a warning, about what they think they can do to me. It's why I was invited.” Vala doesn’t know how to respond, so she says nothing, listens to the soft rustle of clothing as he sinks down onto the rug beside her. “Frar— do you love him?”

“Ha!” It’s the strange, strangled cry of an ill chicken and Vala swallows hard. “I was hoping he would die tonight.” How close is he? If Vala stretches out her hand, will she reach him?

“The others don’t know what to think of you.” Kili murmurs. “Úni swears you’d be loyal to our cause. Ori says you’re hiding secrets, things you’ll never tell a soul. Nori says you’re too slippery to be trusted. Dwalin thinks you’re too young and flighty to depend on.”

“Oh?” Mahal, her throat is so dry. “What do you think?”

A soft sigh sounds near her. He really is so close. “You love your brother Húni. But you hate him, too. You want to desperately to be free of him, but you know that without him, you would have nothing. You don’t know if he loves you or not, if you mean anything to him.” How could he _possibly_ know? The blood throbs behind her closed eyes, and Vala leans against the back of the bench.

Because he’s been there. 

There’s a moment of silence, and she senses a pause, a collection of nerves, before Kili continues. “Does it hurt? The— you know.”

Something seizes in her chest, and she doesn’t know quite what it is. Anger? Laughter? Fear? The thought occurs to Vala that nobody has ever asked her that before.

“Not usually.” She says. “Sometimes I can forget it’s even there. But when I sit down again, I remember. It just… seems to be a part of me now.” Vala falls silent, tries to think of a way to break this awful, agonising intensity between them. She knows what he cannot say.

“How long have you worn it?” He rasps at her side.

“Nearly twenty years.” Mahal, it’s been so long. No wonder it feels as natural to her as her own skin and hair.

“It’s _never_ come off?”

“It has.” Humiliation gnaws at the soft edge of her belly in memory. “Every week, I have to bathe. Only Húni has the key. He sets me free, for a few minutes at a time. But he’s always watching.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the room. He sits there and watches me until he thinks I’m clean enough.” Vala has never admitted this aloud to anybody. Everybody else, Úni and Freja and Signí and Bjirna, they know what is happening, and they’re too powerless to stop it. It sounds so disgusting, hearing it come from her lips like this.

“What?” And Kili is disgusted too. “That’s not right, Vala.”

“I know.”

“Does he…” Kill can’t seem to bring himself to even say it.

“Of course not.” But whether Húni has ever actually wanted to, she’s increasingly unsure. “He can’t marry me off if I’m not a virgin.”

“You can’t want this.”

“No. Never. But there’s no way out of this for me. I can’t just walk away, Kili.”

“My mother did.” He says, quietly. “She walked away, from all of this. She took Fili and left them all to rot. She crossed the Eastern lands with us and never looked back.” Vala’s only ever heard the story in whispered snatches, tentative, afraid, in awe. Part of her thinks it has to be a myth, but Kili got to the West somehow. His father was abolished for a reason. But she can’t just _leave._ Húni would never let her.

“I’m not like her.” Her voice quavers. “I-I’m not strong like she was.”

Out of the darkness, he touches her. Vala gasps, but doesn’t draw back. Kili’s fingertips trace over the shape of her hand, the fingers threaded through the rug, the tendons stretched beneath her skin, the jut of her knuckles. The touch sends a shiver down her spine, and she wishes he would stop. “You _are_ strong. You’ve survived for so long, all alone with him. Húni thinks that he owns you, completely. That there’s not a single thought in your head that isn’t his. But I know that’s not true.”

Something leaps inside of her, deep, hungry, wild and without shape. Possessed by her own terror, with the sight of Frar raising his arms in victory as the blood rushed from his open mouth, with the weight of Húni’s hand around her waist, heavy as stone, sharp as polished steel, Vala is torn. She can see both futures now, spread out in front of her – Frar and Húni and their sadistic bloodlust, their domination and cruelty. A lifetime of terror and pain. Perhaps she’ll learn to live with it, like Freja has. Perhaps one day she’ll look at him the wrong way, speak out of turn, and that will be the end of her. 

Or... what?

“It’s not.” She grabs his hand, claws at it, hungrily. Vala is drowning, and this is all she has. So she reaches out for him in the darkness, traces the shape of his shoulders, his chest, his neck and face. The breath is so hot and shallow against his fingertips. A pulse flutters. Fuck the madness within. She can tame it.

Vala closes her eyes as their mouths meet. His body seizes, and a great throb rocks within her, shuddering through her bones. She has nothing to learn from, only Frar’s ravenous, passionate violence. But as her mouth opens, his does too, inviting her in, and he kisses her back, with a strange, trembling cautiousness, a disbelief at what’s happening. His hands caress her slowly, as though her limbs are made of glass, and settle delicately in the hollow of her neck, resting against her heavy dreadlocks. Vala doesn’t how to respond to this fragility, this unease, so she kisses him in kind, soft as rain, one hand on his leg, palm open and loose, the other curl-fisted in her own lap.

She wants to cry when Kili finally pulls apart. The rush hits her suddenly, swoops through her like a great gust of wind, leaves her exhausted, and for a moment she’s lost herself.

“Vala,” he gasps, stumbling over himself, fractured, confused. “What...”

“Help me.” The voice cracks through the shell of unfeeling. It must. “Kili – there’s only one way out of here for me. Nobody else can help me.”

“How?” His hands tighten now, as he regains his senses. “I-I...”

“I’m going to kill Húni.” The solemn promise falls between them in the darkness, heavy as stone. Kili holds his breath. “You can’t do it. There’s too many guards around. They’ll cut you to pieces if you try. And Húni plans to turn your own guard against you. I don’t know if you can trust them.”

“I can’t ask you to do this.”

“I’m not doing it for you. I want that bastard dead, more than anything else.” Vala tries to put the feast out of her mind, tries to tell herself that it’s hatred and anger and nothing more. Mahal, why does there have to be more? “I can’t fight him either. And I’m watched, everywhere I turn.” It’s not watertight, but it’s the best she can ever do. Will she risk her life on a chance?

What happens if she doesn’t?

“Do you have a plan?” Kili asks in a whisper.

“I need poison.” How long does she have? Perhaps only moments. “I can give it to him, Kili. He trusts me. He’ll never suspect a thing. Fuck, I have him eating out of my hand.”

Instantly, he knows what she means. “The wine.”

“Yes.” It all hinges on this. She’s seen the way he looks at her, like he’s afraid she’ll meet his gaze; the way he tenses up slightly, steeling himself, perhaps, before touching her; the way he kissed her now, so tentative, so unsure and afraid and yet brimming with anticipation. Is this enough to snare him? “I can’t get it myself. They’re always watching.”

He opens his mouth, closes it, and swallows hard. She can hear the low, metallic sound, so close. “I can get it for you. Is there anyone in the house you can trust? An ally? What about your handmaid?”

“No, not her.” The thought of killing her brother is leaving her cold. Is she really going to do this? “My instructress, Signí. She’ll never tell a soul.”

“Signí. I’ll give it to her, to give to you. Will you do it?” He stretches out, takes her by the forearm to pull her in closer, as though he can see her. The weight is as heavy as an anchor, threatening to pull her down to the floor. “He won’t hurt you, I promise. I swear it.”

How many times has Vala closed her eyes and imagined killing him? How many times has that imagined satisfaction flooded her chest at the thought of ending his life, only to dissolve into cold fear and cowardice? She’s strong, but Vala knows she has no chance of ever defeating Húni in a fight. There’s no running away into the arms of another, no refuge for her. The rope presses against her throat, the platform creaking, threatening to give in beneath her. It could kill her. Mahal, if Húni suspected what was happening, he would kill her, with that cold, methodical cruelty that surfaced when he caught his wife in the throes of infidelity. He’d burn her like Hekyr, or skin her alive, or cut her limbs off and feed her, piece by piece, to one of his dogs. A small, girlish voice of protest hums within her – that he loves her, despite his mocking cruelty, despite the sickening way he looks at her, despite his abuse and control. Húni doesn’t want to hurt her; he just wants the best for her, the best for their family. It’s the lies he’s fed her for years, restraining her and jamming it down her throat. She’s almost ready to believe them in this moment, when the enormity of what is as asked of her truly faces her, a mountain that she can never possibly climb.

But _fuck_ , she wants to make him suffer. The realisation takes shape, stretches out, grows limbs and mouth and meaning. She could really kill him, surreptitiously, secretly, the way Freja so cautiously theorised that Húni had killed Father. No more baths with him watching, so poised on his stool against the wall. No more stares that linger longer than they should on her body. No more hands on her skin that make her wither and grow cold with fear. The possibility of another life is poised deep within her, balancing on the head of a pin, and she’s afraid to move, to jolt it in either direction.  

“Will you protect me, when it’ over?” She says. Part of her is ashamed to ask it. “Húni dying won’t save me. I’ve got a dozen uncles and cousins, and Úni’s been cut out. The only way out for me is if I become someone else’s property. Outside the family. You know what that means, don’t you?”

Kili’s breath deepens. He does. “You’re just a little girl.”

The low, throaty laugh tumbles out of her, unbidden. “That’s not stopping Frar.”

There’s a pause. Kili swallows again, leans in a little closer. “You wouldn’t want me, Vala. I’m not right.”

“I don’t care.” She’d ask him to break apart that awful fucking belt right now if she could, to just take her here, force the marriage and break Húni’s scheme to pieces. But Húni would kill them both if he could, and she’s not sure who has more allies right now. “Take me to Erebor. Please. Get me out of here before they kill me.”  

Kili dangles in indecision, then with a gasp, something seems to snap within him. The rough scrape of his beard takes Vala by surprise. He kisses her again, a little harder this time, a confirmation, a vow. Kili seems to relish in the act.

“I promise,” he whispers when they pull apart. A weight settles in Vala’s stomach, cold and heavy with the enormity of the vow that neither of them will utter aloud. “I’ll protect you. I’ll kill them all, if I have to.”


	7. Chapter 7

She’s right. Húni is furious when he finally finds her, cold in his rage, and she shrinks away at the chill in his voice. He’s frigid on the carriage ride home, his hands still in his lap and gaze vacant, looking far beyond her, utterly impenetrable. 

“Where did you go?” He waits until the door is locked behind them, when the maids have taken their cloaks, and they stand alone in the front passageway. Húni watches her now, sharp and cutting, a hawk latched onto a rabbit and ready to dive in for the kill.

“I told you.” She can’t look at him. “I couldn’t find the privvy—”

“ _Don’t_ lie to me, sister.” Húni lashes out, spits fire as he grabs her by the arms and pushes her against the wall. She tenses on instinct, hands balled into fists at her side, terrified and defenceless. “Where did you go? Were you trying to run away?”

“No— I’d never. I told you, I tried to find the privvy, Húni. I haven’t been there before and I got l—” Vala gasps at the sting of the slap against her cheek, a throb of blood rushing in her chest. 

“Bullshit. Why were you trying to hide? Did you meet somebody? Did something frighten you?” Vala’s mouth is dry and empty. He seems to sense her fear, and his hold weakens, just a degree. “What was it? The games? The other dwarves?”

“No.” What would happen if she told the truth? Would Húni sweep her up, declare the marriage over and that she would be spared from Frar? Part of her wants so desperately to believe it. But she suspects he’ll just sneer at her and tell her to harden up and do her duty, that other dams have had it far worse, that she’d finally be earning her keep around here. Wouldn’t he? One of the infuriating things about Húni is that he can sometimes be so difficult to predict.

“It—” the mad wish for his mercy wins out. “It was Frar. I didn’t know he was so violent.” Her works eek out in a low whisper. “So cruel.”

Húni stands frozen for a moment, thinking over what Vala is saying, like counting beads on a long string. That strange, silent moment stretches on, until the hand that had slapped her before comes up to gently caress her flushed, stinging cheek.

“Sister,” he’s whisper-soft, almost caring. Perhaps he really does give a shit. “You’ll be his wife, not a cheap whore to be tossed out. You’re too precious to him. But you have to be good to Frar. Don’t give him cause for anger, and he won’t be compelled to hurt you. Do you understand?”

He doesn’t care. Of course he doesn’t. “Yes, Húni. I understand.” Vala sinks against the wall, extinguished.

* * *

There’s an ebb, a momentary lapse; days pass before Húni mentions Kili again, and when he does, he’s stiff-backed, detached, unfeeling. “Word is, Valka has been having Kili over at her house. With her granddaughters.” He catches Vala in the hallway on the way to her lessons, his eye glistening, hard as steel. “I’d say she’s going to try and win him onto her side with a promise of marriage.”

 Something leaps in Vala’s chest, a surge of hope. “Do you want to—”

“I’m not going to bow and scrape and offer my blood to _him_.” Húni snarls at the thought of it. “You know our plan, sister. With Fræg’s wealth and our provenance, he won’t be a match for us. But we can’t arouse his suspicion, so I’ve invited him to a private dinner. Tonight. Just the three of us. I want to get to know him a little better.” She doesn’t trust him.

“Should I wear something from the trunk?”

A low chuckle rumbles. “Of course.”

* * *

Vala can’t focus on anything, and Signí raps her knuckles with her wooden ruler for not paying attention. The anxiety is sharp as a pin in her mind, piercing through the scraps of her thoughts. They’d made a solemn vow that night, unkept. Maybe he’s already got the poison to Signí, and she’s waiting for the right moment. Maybe he’s going to ask her tonight if she really meant it. She tried to put the conversation out of her mind, stuff it down and tried to ignore it and just wait, but now it bears over everything. Is she going to go through with it?

She’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t be a pawn, all those weeks ago. Is she negating that promise now? But this isn’t the mindless execution of Kili’s will. This isn’t her going along for the promise of wealth or love or protection. Nobody wants Húni dead more than her.

She watches Signí stoke the fire, her heavy skirts flowing over her bent legs, catching a glimpse of her calf, at the soft, glossy hair scattered over the pale limb. Her dreadlocks are darker than Vala’s, the colour of honey, with threads of grey catching the light on occasion. It’s impossible to know how old she is. She must be an ally, Vala is sure of it.

Bjirna chatters and flits about like a bird, clucking as she holds up a string of gems and then a pearl necklace against Vala’s breast. “I like the sapphires, but the pearls make your skin look lovely. What do you think, Miss Vala?”

She has a headache. “Whatever you think is best, Bjirna.”

Kili is a little earlier than promised, but Vala and Húni are both ready to greet him. Again, he takes her hand and raises it to her lips, searching her for some hidden truth. She remains closed-off, vacant, and will not give it to him. Not yet.

Vala pours wine – Húni first, of course – and then sits beside her brother, Kili across from them. He devotes equal attention to them both with his eyes, but it’s Húni he speaks to, asking about the tournament earlier in the week, a recent explosion in their largest coal mine and when it will be free to work again, what information he has about a trade dispute between the Easterlings and the Stiffbeards. He’s gleaning what information he can, trying to find a way in, a handle on the Ironfists that can win them over. He’s been doing it for weeks. Húni is interrogative in kind, demanding to know about Erebor, about her mines, her machinery, her smithwork, her trade. He playacts the investor, drawing up the plans for a new property, and she wonders if Kili believes any of it.

“Come,” when Húni decides they have eaten enough, he pushes his chair back. “I have something, Your Highness, which I’m sure you will appreciate.” Kili’s eyes meet Vala’s for a moment, soft and questioning, and she just shrugs a little. She doesn’t know.

Húni leads them into Father’s old study that he’s now claimed as his own, with the neat row of his best books on the shelf, the table with a single chair before it stacked with maps and loose papers, with the heavy cabinet against the wall, the brass lock gleaming in the cheerful firelight.

The dwarves sit, but there’s no wine, and Vala hovers, unsure what to do. Húni smiles as he reaches into the pocket of his trousers and pulls out a ring of keys with varying shapes and sizes and metals. “In the cabinet, sister,” he holds up two keys – a long brass one, and a smaller, made of iron – “you will find something for us to drink.”

“Yes, Húni.” She takes it, unlocks the cabinet and finds on the bottom shelf what her brother is talking about. It’s a very old box, made of a dark, nearly black wood. The iron lock is spotted with rust. There are strange carvings on the lid, which look like angry jagged slashes in the wood, a language she doesn’t know.

“Bring it over here.” It’s heavy. What’s inside? “This was given to our grandfather, Úni, a hundred-and-fifty years ago.” Does the name cause distaste for Húni, to say it now? “On the table, sister. The iron key.”

Vala unlocks it, and the hinges shudder from a century of disuse. She has to force it open. A stone bottle, a little larger than a pint, with a stopper sealed in black wax, and two squat cups, maybe half as high as her first. The paper plastered to the front has nearly disintegrated and the ink is faded and unreadable. “Our grandfather assisted the old King Vili negotiate an alliance with a nearby tribe when he was very young. The partnership crumbled, but not before he was given this by an emissary to their chieftain as a token of his gratitude.”

“What nearby tribe?” Vala asks softly as she lifts the stone bottle out. It’s smooth in her hands, and very cold. “What is it?”

“It’s _ambor_.” Kili is reading the lid. “The chieftain’s name was Bûrzum and he led a clan of ten thousand orcs.” Orcs? Really? “The _ambor_ was to be drunk together by the king and his chief fifty years after the alliance was first struck.” He looks at Húni now. “Was it my grandfather’s intention to slaughter them, or yours?”

It’s the first time he’s drawn such plain attention to the connection between them, and Húni pauses. “It would have been a joint decision. My father warned me some years ago that it wouldn’t last much longer in the bottle. He kept it as a curio, but I thought that seeing as it’s supposed to be an excellent drop, you would appreciate it.”

Kili frowns, caught off-guard. “How do you know I drank this stuff?”

“You were in the company of orcs for quite some time, Your Highness. They do the same as us in their spare time, don’t they? Drink, and gamble and neck around with one another.” Kili swallows; she sees the muscles move up and down in his throat over his buttoned shirt. “You must have adopted a number of their customs to get them to trust you. Come, sister, let’s get it open.” 

“Small pours, no thicker than two fingers,” Kili warns as Vala takes the bottle. He looks a little out of sorts. This has rattled him. She uses the lip of the box to cut into the old wax, which crumbles in her fingers once disturbed. “It’s strong stuff. A wine-cup’s worth will knock you out.”

Perhaps that’s what Húni is after, Vala wonders as she sloshes the liquid out. “Be generous, Vala, and don’t forget yourself, now. Take one of the empty wine-cups.” It’s the colour of honey, thin and light. The smell strikes her immediately, beyond name. It’s deep and smoky, like old fire, with something biting and dry behind it.

“How do the orcs toast, Your Highness?” Húni asks. “What do they say?”

Kili looks down into the stone cup, a strange softness lingering behind his dark eyes for a moment, a memory. Vala is drawn to it. “ _Drûkh_.” He finally says, his lips barely moving.

“Well, then.” Húni raises his hand. “To allies. _Drûkh_.”

Cautious of Kili’s warning, Vala takes only a small sip and immediately sputters. It’s like fire, burning along her tongue, the roof of her mouth, her throat, and as she swallows, the flames burrow down into her chest. “It’s poison!” She gasps, stupidly, numbly, wiping at her wet lips, pushing down the urge to gag.

Húni’s face flickers, a moment of worry, but Kili is unperturbed. “It was made for both kings to drink. It would never be poisoned, unless Bûrzum had a death wish. And even if it were, it would have no effect after so long. _Ambor_ just always tastes like this.”

She can see Húni is fighting the urge to shudder, determined to keep a straight face before this prince who swallows it back so effortlessly, with the tenderness of meeting an old friend. “Not bad.” Kili says after a moment of silence, meaning it. “Smooth. The cheap stuff tastes like an old bog.”

“My grandfather said it was a shame the alliance was so short-lived. He admired more than just the liquor. He said the orcs had much we could learn from. They’re more cunning than we dwarves gave them credit for. Do you agree, Your Highness?”

Vala presses her tongue against the roof of her mouth to block her nose, and forces down a mouthful of liquid fire. “I don’t think anybody who’s fought an orc would write them off as stupid. They’re cruel, but they’re not fools.”

Kili is such a strange entity to him, and Vala sees what Húni is trying to do. He thinks that he can find a weakness, something previously unknown, by embracing this hidden side of Kili’s life, rather than stuffing it down and pretending that it doesn’t exist. How did the Longbeards feel, she wonders, as she studies the thread of his scar stretching with his speech. How did they respond to such a terrible intrusion into the rigid world that they knew? Kili seems a little taken aback by her brother’s approach, navigating the flow of conversation with more care than before. He’s not used to talking about this to anybody, least of all to someone with such a false, fragile alliance.

“Are we worse than them?” Vala speaks in a moment of silence, her words striking with a sharp force that she didn’t expect. Húni inhales deeply, angry at her, but Kili allows himself the luxury of leaning back and thinking, working a thumb around the rim of his stone cup.

“It depends on who you ask. My brother believes you can find the good in anybody, if you look hard enough. Fili thinks very few people are beyond redemption. He’s fighting for this alliance, even after everything that your folk have done.”

“None of it was unearned.” Kili’s knuckles whiten, and Vala knows Húni has gone too far.

“My mother didn’t deserve it.” He fights for control with his base emotions. “No dam does. Ever.” Úni must have told him about Hekyr. Kili hates her brother, then, violently, for what he did to his wife, for what he’s doing to Vala now. Kili longs to murder him, and the only thing that stays his hand is the knowledge that a dozen armed guards stand between him and the locked front door. He’d never survive.

“So we are worse.” Vala plucks up the courage to speak. Kili sits frozen, thinking it over, before his tight, curled lip relaxes.

“Ironfists snatch their wives helplessly from their beds. Orcs eat their own when the winter frosts kill their stock. Both kill and maim and torture for sport. It’s not a matter of who is worse. They’re merely different.”

Vala longs to ask if Kili is as optimistic as his brother; if he too believes that anyone can be redeemed, and if there is hope for the Ironfists too, for this alliance. But the question brushes too closely to the truth, and she’s not sure she wants to know the answer, so instead she merely takes the stone bottle. Vala uncorks it, and with her head bent and eyes down, demure and voiceless, does her duty.

* * *

The night stretches on. She realises quickly that they can’t see how much the other is drinking, so she gives her brother generous pours and Kili little dribbles, until Húni is slack-necked and lolling in his chair, stumbling over half-formed words.

Finally, he sets down his cup. “It’s late,” he slurs, struggling to talk. “Vala, show our guest out.” Vala just nods, too frightened to look at Kili until they’ve both left the room.

The iron handle is cool and as the door swings open, a draught of chilly air brushes against her face. It reminds her of those cold, lonely walks that stretched from morning into afternoon, of frost and pale sunlight, of winter breezes, of the rustle of scrubby grass, of the wild, iron smell of rain on weathered grey rock. Longing seizes in her chest, a fist squeezing around her heart, tight enough to choke the air in her lungs. Vala imagines it before her – the low, rugged foothills, the blistering heat of the desert, the throb of Rhûn’s water-pulse against the coastline, the single, solitary jagged peak of Erebor, beckoning her, signalling a new life.

Mahal, she needs to see the sun again.

In the entrance-room, the guard takes a key and leaves them for a little side-room where Kili’s knives and sword are locked up close, safe from causing any harm. The other guards, the ones who followed them out, have gone to find some servants to help Húni into bed. The door-watchers wait outside, in the street. Now they really are alone, with nobody to intrude on them. Vala takes a chance, stretched up to her toes and presses her mouth against the scar on his face, wondering, no, knowing, who put it there. The same savage hand that marked his wrist, she’d heard, claimed Kili as his own.

Kili stands very still, his face unmoving at her touch, apart from the shallow pant of air between his half-open mouth. Despite his stillness, something seems to strain within him, tugging at the chains, on the verge of breaking free and wreaking destruction. “Vala,” he breathes, but nothing afterwards, because he doesn’t know what else to say, and in that moment Vala wonders if he really is in love with her.

“Promise me.” She whispers, low and savage, like teeth scraping against his cheek. “After I do it, you’ll get me out of here. And you’ll do what it takes to save me.”

“I promise.” Behind her, the lock clicks and Vala pulls away, holding her breath as the guard enters the room.

“Good night, Your Highness.” There’s a strange lightness inside of her, something swelling. There’s no chill in her resolution to murder her brother. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing you again very soon.”

* * *

When will it happen? Will there be any instruction, a slipped note, a whispered word or two in her ear, a silent gaze, a gesture? Will it turn up in her folded underclothes, hidden in the toe of her slipper, pressed beneath her mattress? Mahal, how will she hide it? Nothing is safe from Húni, ever. He has eyes all over this house, fingers in every drawer, every nook and cranny in her rooms. He touches everything. Panic pushes in her gut the next morning and she wonders if she can get a message out to him, to say no, she can’t do it, she’s too afraid, but Vala forces it back. There’s no other way to escape him, and she’s running out of time. Kili swore he’d look after. He can do this. He can’t kill Húni himself, he’s too well-protected, and Vala suspects Úni of too much of a milksop to even try. No one else is close enough, strong enough, to inflict a fatal blow.

But she doesn’t need to wait long. Just two days later, when she enters the chamber she shares during the day with Signí, she sees the dam sitting on her bench, unusually tense and tight, a book resting on her lap, closed. Without a word, she signals Vala to come. Vala sits on the bench, and Signí gestures her in, until they’re close enough for their hips to touch. She wonders if Signí can feel the iron beneath her skirts, the way she felt it against Freja all those years ago.

“This is a dangerous, dangerous game.” Signí whispers in her ear. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Vala swallows. “Do you have it?” The nerves pluck in her stomach now, a biting hum like the stringed instruments she’s seen the fools play.

“One of his kin brought it to me.” Signí draws a small circle on the front of the book with her finger. It’s the same octavo she’d given Ori, from her grandfather’s library. “Lily of the valley. Give it to him tonight, with his wine after dinner. It’s potent – if you half-fill a jug and put this in, he’ll only need a cup or two. The poison will kick in during his sleep. No one will notice until he fails to rise in the morning.”

“Then what?” She has to get out somehow. Did they tell Signí that part?

“One of the kitchen girls gets up to start on the daily bread well before dawn.” Her breath tickles Vala’s ear. “You need to get the key to your room from Bjirna, somehow. Go into the kitchen, and she’ll dress you and help you sneak out into the back courtyard. You’ve done it before. It’ll be dark, the guards won’t recognise you if they see. Kili will be waiting for you in the alley.”

Signí leans back, drained, with a little shake of her head. Vala can tell that she hates this, that she thinks it’s all terrible, but she says nothing. “I have to do it,” Vala whispers, to fill in the silence more than anything else. “It’s either this or marry Frar. And he’ll kill me in the end, I know he will.”

“I know.” Signí finally sighs. “You’re too headstrong, Vala. It’ll be the death of you.” 

“I’d rather be dead than be like Freja.” The words are supposed to stoke conviction in her, but she just feels frightened. The book lies abandoned in Signí’s lap, and Vala takes it. She opens the cover and turns the pages to find a hole carved in the vellum, concealing a vial of poison, a little narrower than her finger and just over half as long. The stopper is sealed with wax.

“I put it in a new vial and waxed it.” Signí looks at her. “To make sure it won’t leak when you hide it.” 

Of course. There is one place where no one has ever gone, not even Húni, the one place where nobody would ever think to look. Vala squeezes her thighs together, takes the vial and clenches her fist around it. “I have to go to the privvy.”

Nothing’s ever been in there before. Vala uses her smallest finger and winces as the glass rasps against the metal teeth, and nicks the skin just beneath the nail. She sucks on the blood in the darkness, clenching down, feeling the cool press of the vial grow warm and her resistance to the intrusion slacken. She’ll have to be careful when she sits down. The glass looks thick, but Vala is terrified of it cracking, of the sharp edges cutting into her and the poison leaking into her body. There’s nowhere else to hide it, though. Húni’s stripped it all away. 

* * *

The servants bring dinner to the table – roasted pork loin, charred sweet potatoes, bread and butter, the colour of sunshine. It will be difficult to eat tonight. Vala can feel, in her memories, Kili looking at her, see the quiver in his lip as she closes her eyes, feel the puckered line of his scar beneath her lips. He’ll protect her, she tells herself. He made a promise.

Vala tries to close her mind to it, and avoids looking at the fire in the grate, burning over her brother’s shoulder as he takes his seat in Father’s old chair. One of the guards comes in, murmurs softly in Húni’s ear. They’re always whispering to him, asking for secret orders, passing along information she’s never privy to. It’s normal. Húni just nods, sniffs the air a little, testing the smell of dinner, and stretches out in his chair.

“I spoke at length with Baldr today, while you were in your lessons, sister.” Húni speaks as Vala crosses the room. The jug of wine is empty, waiting for her behind the screen, woven with faded red cloth. Vala looks from the jug to the barrel, not daring to glance behind her. She’s gone over in her head how she’s going to do this without her brother noticing, without taking more than a few precious seconds to commit her crime. She places the jug beneath the barrel-tap and turns it on to a slow dribble – Húni likes it to froth and fizzle a little before drinking it. He says it greatly improves the taste.

It’s now. It _has_ to be now. 

“Oh?” She struggles to keep her voice steady, with just a hint of curiosity. “How fares Uncle Baldr and his family? What did you discuss?” Yes, yes, get him talking. With her right hand, she reaches up into her skirts, tracing along the row of teeth. Vala pushes, the way she imagines dams do when they’re heavy with child. Mahal, please, please _please_ , come out. She catches the edge of the vial and pulls, hoping beyond hope that it doesn’t make a sound.

“He was interested to know how our exchange with Kili went. I told him about my plan with the orcish booze.” Vala uses her teeth to break the seal wax, not trusting her shaking hands. The liquid is a deep, deep red, nearly black in the firelight. Hopefully it will dissolve into the wine quickly enough. “Baldr hoped it would offend him, but I know the brat’s less reticent than that. Part of himself is proud of what he’s done. Did you notice that?”

“I did.” The poison dribbles into the jug and Vala closes her eyes, feeling her heart bang against her chest with the clamouring violence of a battle-drum. “He was taken aback by it, though. I don’t think the Longbeards like to think about what he’s done.” Somehow, her voice seems normal. Can Húni detect an edge of panic in the timbre? Does he suspect anything? She jams her thumb against the cork, sealing it as best she can, and reaches back into her skirts.

No going back now. Vala turns, carries the jug as she normally does, holding the handle in one hand, cupping the porcelain blue-painted belly with the other. Húni smiles a little when he sees her. Nothing amiss. She bends carefully, at the waist, and lets the wine trickle steadily into her brother’s cup. Vala tries to swirl the jug a little, to help dissolve it, her toes curling inside her embroidered slippers.

“Much obliged, sister.” Húni’s hand grips the cup, and he rises it slowly to his lips. Vala’s mouth is bone-dry, and something lurches inside of her, that same girlish panic that tried to stay his hand at Hepti’s feast, that protesting voice deep in her chest that insisted Húni knew best, that he was always looking out for her – that cowed, dominated little girl that had nothing else apart from him, that still clung to the hopeless belief that he may have loved her. Part of her wants to slap the cup out of his hand.

“It occurs to me, how rude I’m being.” The cup freezes halfway to his mouth. Vala stands very still. “Sitting here while you serve me and the pork turns cold. Pour your own and sit down, Vala. You deserve some comforts too.”

The world lurches beneath Vala’s feet. How to talk her way out of this one? She always stands and waits for Húni to finish the first cup, as meek and quiet as a servant. This never happens. A cold note strikes in the back of Vala’s neck, spreads slowly down her spine.

_This never happens._

“Th-Thank you, Húni, but I’m feeling a little unwell tonight. I don’t think wine would be good for my stomach. I’ll just wait.”

Húni just looks at her, looks down at his drink, and then his knuckles whiten. “Sit the _fuck_ down and pour a cup for yourself, sister.” His teeth flash, there’s a cold, steely glint in his eye. The wine sloshes, as she clumsily pours it out, her hands shaking madly, and she knows Húni can see it. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he _knows_ , he has to know. She’ll deny it for as long as she can, play the innocent. How can he suspect her? She’s done nothing to earn his mistrust, nothing. As far as he knows, she’s been a good girl. Vala holds her breath as she sits down. She’s always been good.

“Bring her in!” His voice rises, he’s staring over her shoulder at the door, and after a moment it swings open and the guards come in, two of them, and they each have their hand on a dam, dragging her, lurching and unsteadily on her feet. She’s naked, her hair’s been shorn and her face is so bruised and battered and streaked with blood that it takes a moment for Vala to recognise her. 

Signí.

A high whimper breaks in Vala’s throat and the cup tumbles from her hands and spills poisoned wine across the crimson rug, stained, worn threadbare in patches. The horror slowly rolls along Vala’s body, from her feet, through her legs, along her arms until her fingertips are numb.

No, no, Mahal, no. She needs to stand up, to move, to run, to get away from him, but Vala sits frozen, watching as the guards let Signí fall to the floor, moaning and clawing at the rug. Signí lifts her head and through the blood Vala sees her eyes black and swollen shut, the teeth smashed from her mouth, her nose purple, swollen several times its normal size. A high-pitched animal sound, a keening cry, tears from that awful gaping mouth as Signí begs brokenly for mercy. They’ve cut her tongue out.

“Do you think I don’t have people watching every inch of this house, sister?” Húni stands, a single, fluid motion, still clutching his wine. “Do you think I wouldn’t notice one of Kili’s allies talking to your instructress in a cheap pub near her home?” Vala dry-retches, the rush of vomit burning in her throat, but she’s frozen in her terror, unable to move. “She took quite the beating before she broke. But they got her to talk. Lily of the Valley in the wine. How _clever_. After all, I’d never distrust you, would I?” He kicks Signí in the side. She moans, curled up like an ill babe, and Húni upends his untouched wine-cup over her. Wine gushes over her limbs, the same dark purple as the heavy bruises that mottle her skin, and Signí scrabbles helplessly, twisting like a fish beneath the poison.

Vala finally staggers to her feet, a newborn colt. But before she can take two steps, the guards who dragged Signí in march towards her, and they have her by the arms. Vala screams, tries to struggle, but their grip is strong and pitiless.

“Where did you hide it?” Húni spits, and grabs the knot of her hair, coiled on top of her head, as though it’s hidden there. A knife flashes from his hip and he drags it across her scalp and her elaborately coiled dreadlocks falls away. But there’s nothing there, and he tosses it to the ground. “Where is it?!” Vala can only gasp as he cuts through the thin lacing on her bodice with ease. Another slice and the skirts are gone too, and Vala is standing in just her slippers and belt. Her knees are weak now, too weak to stand, and the guards hold her up as she slackens.

“Where is it!” He kicks at the puddle of her clothes, as though a vial of poison would clatter to the floor. Nothing emerges, and Húni’s fists curl as his eyes settle on her last bastion of privacy, the one thing that he has decreed no one ever, ever touch.

“Grab her legs.” He reaches inside his neck for the key and the guards seem to know what he’s going to do. Vala screams, tries to wrestle free and they hook one arm each under her thighs, spreading her out, open and defenceless. They’re so strong. Húni slides the key into the lock effortlessly, as he’s done so many times before, and the metal clangs to the ground, never to touch her again, and he’s reaching in with three fingers, and Mahal, it _hurts_ , worse than her monthly bleeding, and he digs it out so brutally, like he’s wanting to cause her pain.

“You slippery little bitch, hiding this in your cunt.” There’s blood on his fingers and Vala feels the sour bile rise in her throat again. “You thought I’d never look there.” Húni turns and throws the empty vial, and it shatters against the stone wall.  Húni stares after it for a while. Something seems to take hold of him for a moment; his shoulders spasm and his hands are shaking and it almost seems to Vala like he’s holding back the urge to cry.

“Why?” He whispers. The guards are still holding Vala up and apart and Húni stands just between her open legs. One hand, with blood on his fingers, rests against her thigh. “Wasn’t I good to you? I looked after you. I protected you.” Signí is up on her elbows and knees behind him, listening for his voice, trying to get her bearings. Vala can’t look at her. “And you betrayed me. For who? Him?”

“I-I didn’t— P-Please, Huni—”

“You’re nothing better than a common slut. Grasping at the first dwarf to pay you any attention. You thought you could be a prince’s wife, Vala, is that it?”

“No,” she moans. “No, I-I never—”

“You thought you could swan off to Erebor to their gems and jewels? That you could forsake the will of our family, our honour, our father’s memory for that bastard brat and his fool of his brother?” He’s working himself up into a violent, frothing rage, one she remembers so clearly, ever since she was a little girl watching Úni scream and sob as he tried to drawl away on his broken arms and legs.

“Please, please—” Vala gasps as he rests the flat of the blade against her sternum, between her breasts.

“No,” he growls. “You don’t get to say please. You don’t get to beg for mercy. Do you know what I’m going to do to you, sister?” His lip twitches and Vala thinks at first he’s going to slice her open, gut her like a pig and watch the blood spatter and her innards fall out, but instead he steps back, turns and grabs Signí by the shoulder and hauls her up. Signí can’t walk and Húni just drags her along like a broken doll. The fire shines red on his face.

“No—Húni no! _No!”_ Vala thrashes wildly as she realises what he’s going to do, Signí whimpers, a senseless husk and she’s trying to fight back against Húni, but he’s too strong and she’s too broken, and blind, and mute, and Vala screams but the guards hold fast, and without a word, Húni grabs Signí by the back of the neck, crouches down, and thrusts her into the open fire.

He holds her in place with a foot between her shoulder-blades. Vala is screaming and screaming but she’s so helpless, so powerless, and all she can do is watch Signí twist and turn and struggle, as the flames rise higher and after a few moments that seem to drag on and on, she falls slack, and Húni steps back, his head bent and shoulders heaving. 

Vala falls slack, chill with terror. He’s going to kill her, the same way he killed Signí, and he killed Hekyr. Mahal, she’s doing to die. What’s he going to do to her first?

“How _could_ you? _”_ Húni seizes the jug and throws it against the stone fireplace. Wine sprays over the rug, over the floorboards, and shards of porcelain litter the ground. “Your own brother! How? What have I done to you to deserve this?”

A light sparks in her chest at the plaintive cry, catches alight. Does he really not understand how fucked up this is? Is he so blind to all the hurt he’s caused? But all of it remains bottled up inside of her, unbidden. She’s too afraid to talk, to anger him further. “Please,” she just moans. “Húni, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please—”

“Shut up!” He roars in her face, a lion bearing a blade, so similar to their family crest. Vala cringes away from him. “Say another word, Vala, and I will cut your tongue out.” And he will too. His knuckles are white on the knife, begging for a reason to land the killing blow.

“I thought I could trust you.” He went on, his voice growing more quiet, more steady. “We’re family, Vala. We look after each other.” It’s worse, in a way. Húni’s detaching herself from her, severing his heartstrings. He’s getting ready to kill her. He can’t do it in a fit of rage, because rage is passion, and passion is love, and he loves himself too much to kill her. So instead he has to become stiff and cold and dead. The knife is so close to her face. Her hair is in rags, some dreadlocks creeping along the back of her neck, some just half an inch long after being so savagely cut away. Her head feels strangely light.

“But you’re just like him.” He’s so _bleak_. The hands are hot on her bare flesh, straining against her, quivering in bloodlust and anticipation. They think she’s an uppity bitch who’s getting what’s coming to her. Perhaps they’re waiting for Húni to say they’re free to fuck her, in one final humiliation. “Foolish.”

But she doesn’t speak. His past threat is an iron weight on her chest, suffocating her. Mahal, please. Somebody spare her.

Then he reaches out, seizes her arm, and the guards let go. Vala sinks to her knees and she feels liquid, boneless, gliding smoothly across the rug as he drags her towards the fire. This was always going to happen, she thinks, hearkening back to those dim, dusty memories of her girlhood, the blunt, unseeing, unknowing horror of Hekyr’s burned body eating at her slowly, robbing her of feeling. There’s no ruminating on what she could have done differently, on how she may have escaped him, on what she did wrong. She doesn’t have the luxury for that.

The fire is so hot. It lights something inside of her, and Vala reaches out, desperate, scrabbling, an animal nursing a death-blow fighting to defend itself. Her right hand, the free arm, closes around porcelain, the edge sharp and jagged, cutting into the soft flesh of her palm, drawing blood. The residue of poison and wine sting.

The edges of her body have disappeared. Vala is everywhere, looking down on herself being led to her death from the ceiling, looking through her brother’s stone-cold eyes as he balances on the edge of murder, looking up at the ceiling, so hazy and dim, obscured through acrid smoke. Húni is so strong against her, his stout, heavy body unyielding, giving nothing away, one hand on her arm and the other on the back of her neck, and she buckles against the rug and then she can’t breathe and there’s fire, all around, burning in her lungs, burning her flesh, burning her hair and in that frozen moment of agony, she lunges as instinct quells the fear, every muscle in her body twitching and seizing and writhing.

His arms are so hard on her, so unmoving, but she has one hand free, and Vala strikes out,  the jagged edge of the jug sinks into soft, unguarded skin. Blood splatters her face, the side that isn’t burning, and then that weight is lifted for a moment, long enough for her to twist and struggle, until the air isn’t smoke and fire anymore and she can breathe.

Her face rests against the carpet. Every muscle is loose and exhausted, and through half-lidded eyes, she sees Húni on his side, clutching madly at his neck where a shard of porcelain is sticking out from his flesh. The side of her face is still on fire, and she can smell burning hair.

“My lord!” The guards are on Húni, hands on his wound, in an attempt to stem the blood. Húni writhes and gurgles, making shapeless, empty words, his eyes blankly focused on the ceiling.

“Get her!” One guard snaps at the other. “Lock her up; we’ll deal with her later. And get a healer. Fuck!” Blood is oozing through his fingers, so red, so like wine, Vala thinks, oddly dreamlike.

She’s forced onto her feet, smoke-stung eyes too swollen to see clearly. The guard is spitting something vile in her ear as she’s dragged along, saying he’ll make her suffer, the treacherous bitch, the deceptive cunt, that they’ll string her up for it, flay her alive, shove their fists in her, set the dogs on her.

Vala is thrown into somewhere cool and dark, on her knees, and behind her, the lock clicks and she’s left in darkness, nearly complete. She hunches over, her heart thumping violently within her, the blood a raging torrent along her limbs.

Slowly, the violence cools. Vala lies on her back, the cobblestoned ground so cold against her skin. The edges of her body come back to her, the dream fades and she slowly pieces together what has happened. There was fire. She reaches out to touch her face and feels burnt and blistered flesh, oozing.

Soon, it’s all she can feel. Vala arches her back against the stone, and screams.


	8. Chapter 8

Time passes. Vala has no sense of it. It’s impossible to count minutes, hours, days. There’s nothing to focus on, no memory, no other sense except the excruciating agony of the burn that stretches along her neck, her collarbone, her chin and cheek and scalp. Húni held her in the fire, just long enough to burn her, not long enough to kill her. She smells scorched flesh and hair, nothing else. The room is empty, pitch-black except a rim of yellow light beneath the door-frame from some distant lantern. The wood is thick and unmoving and the iron lock is sound. Vala lies on her side, the burn facing towards the air, her palm flat against the stone.

Is Húni dead? Is Kili still coming for her? She doesn’t know, doesn’t care. The senseless pain threatens to consume her, and Vala thinks more than once that she’s going to die, either from the burn or from hunger or thirst or cold. A few handspans of flesh are afire and the rest is ice, quivering uncontrollably. She hunches in on herself, a foetus, closes her eyes and listens to the dull sound of dwarves roaring in the distance. Once or twice, she thinks she hears the clash of steel.

Hunger crawls in her stomach, thirst in her throat, and Vala drifts, floating on the edge of consciousness. At first, she’s too afraid to call for help, and then when she does try, her voice rasps, barely above a whisper, and it’s so hard to move, so painful to even lift her head a little that she just lies as still as she can, waiting for salvation that may never come.

She tries not to think of Signí, but she can’t stop her face from appearing in her mind, so bruised and bloody and broken. It’s all her fault. Vala dragged Signí into this, and she paid the highest price for it. Guilt claws at her chest. “I’m sorry,” the whisper rasps in Vala’s throat, useless, pitiful, heard by nobody. 

Then after a stretch of silence so impossibly long that her ears ring and she can feel the minutiae of her organs squeeze and squirm and pulse inside her cage of bones, Vala hears a sound, the soft, distant sound of speech, and she freezes, hands clenched around nothing, straining to listen.

The voices drift closer – not close enough to hear the shape of words, but close enough to hear that it’s a dam, and another dam too, talking to one another, and the spark lights up in Vala’s hollow chest. In that cold fear and agony, a dam, any dam, is a friend. Vala heaves herself onto her knees, joints stiff, aching, frozen, and crawls towards the door.

“Help,” she croaks, dry and withered, knowing nobody will hear her, but she tries all the same. “Help!” Vala pounds at the door, weak as straw wrapped in rags, so fragile. The distant speech pauses. “Help, help me!” She leans her forehead against the wood. “Help!”

Then there’s a low boom, the thud of someone smashing at the lock to try and get in, and the room is filled with light. Vala hisses, presses a hand to her eyes, as a dam screams, a voice that’s familiar to her, and a hand is on her arm, deliciously warm, soft and tender to the touch. Somebody is draping a blanket over her shoulders, lifting her up and Vala slowly cracks her eyes open and sees the dim outline of a dam swim in front of her, until it grows distinct, solid, grows shape and colour, hair, a mouth, eyes. Vala’s breath halts in her throat.

“Mahal,” Freja is crying tight, angry little tears that gather in the corners of her eyes and refuse to fall. “I thought you were dead.”

* * *

Someone – it’s Lína, Vala comes to realise – lifts her up like a babe, the unburned side of her face resting against her shoulder, bundled in a thick woven blanket pulled over her head, hiding her vision. Vala allows herself to carried, on the edge of being.

She falls asleep in the back of a carriage, and wakes only long enough to sip at a strong-smelling tea. She’s in bed. And then she falls again, sinking into a sleep so deliciously deep that she doesn’t even dream, just lost to the world, turning endlessly, a fallen leaf in a stream that trickles on for ever.

Dull sounds, throbs of pain, beat against her but she feels them only distantly, and they vanish from memory when she wakes, too tired and sluggish to open her eyes.

“She’ll live, won’t she?” A voice. Is it Freja? Vala thinks so. She sounds afraid.

“I think so.” It’s a dwarf’s voice, or a man’s, perhaps, with a thick accent full of high, sharp vowels. “We just have to hope...” But Vala doesn’t catch it, drifting off to sleep again, turning on the everlasting tide.

When she rises, Vala feels awake, solid. Her body has a shape again. Her stomach aches with hunger. Her face is burning. It feels bound. The blankets are warm, heavy. Her fingers and toes tingle. She feels all of this slowly, her eyes still closed. There’s no sound, just the low crackle of a fire in the room with her. It pinches in her belly, a note of fear in the memory.

She opens her eyes. It’s a room she’s never seen before, small and clean, but with no windows. There’s a narrow bed, a table crammed with innumerable bottles and books with a stool before it, pushed up against the wall, a spindly chair beside the fire. A dam is darning a sock, her head bent, and it takes a moment for Vala to recognise her.

“Brunhild.” She rasps. The word causes pain in the right side of her face. Brunhild lifts her head, and smiles, shoulders sagging in relief.

“Oh, darling,” She sinks to her knees beside the bed. “Oh, you sweet little fool.”

“What—” Her tongue is swollen in her throat, speech clumsy. How long has she been asleep? “What happened?”

“Don’t worry about that sweetheart.” A strange, tight expression crosses Brunhild’s face. “Let’s just get you some tea, hm?”

Brunhild holds the cup to her lips. It’s hot and sweet and laced with herbs. “Where am I?” Vala whispers, trying to piece together the fragments of memory in her woolly brain.

“You’re safe.” Brunhild dabs at her forehead with a cool, damp cloth. “How does your face feel? Is it burning?”

“Mm-hm.” The more she wakes up, the worst it feels.

“I’ll get you some poppy-tears. Magó said you can have a little if the pain gets too much.”

“Magó?”

“An Easterling healer. You’re lucky he was here, tending to the coal-miners from that awful explosion. Mistress Freja is paying a pretty penny for him to stay here and watch over you and keep quiet. She’s awfully fretful. We weren’t sure for a while if you would survive.”

“What happened?” She asks again.

“Don’t worry yourself, with that, Miss Vala. Here you go, just breathe this in. That’s it, nice and slow. Good girl. Just lie down there, that’s it. Just relax...”

* * *

Vala dreams, loose and formless, little more than voices, distant flashes of light. Perhaps it’s the poppy-tears. She wakes again, long enough to be fed a small bowl of broth, before vanishing once more into the darkness. She’s safe; Vala grabs onto the thought and doesn’t let it go. Húni must be dead. If he was still alive, than he’d have killed her by now.

Some days pass, she’s not sure how many. The hours between wakefulness and sleep are scattered and few. She’s fed twice a day, the same bland broth with a few vegetables, some pale mouthfuls of meat if she’s lucky. She runs a hand over her hair. Someone else has cut it all off, cleaned up Húni’s ragged hack job, and it reminds her of the fur of an animal, short and bristly. Brunhild sits by the fire, her soft, dark eyes so wide in concern, her mouth pinched and tight. There’s a fierceness in her protection, an edge of fear. Is Vala as safe as Brunhild says?

Magó comes to see her often. His accent matches his thin, sharp-nosed face, matches his wispy beard as black as pitch and his hair all wrapped up in scarlet cloth. His fingers are long and thin, flesh pulled tight over naked bones, Vala thinks as he unwinds the cloth around her face. He unbinds her every day, checks her skin, sometimes smears a paste on it which sets the fire burning all over again. She asks for more poppy-tears, for the hazy dream to take her away, her eyes stinging with the pain, but Magó won’t be shaken.

“It’s nasty stuff, in the long run.” He warns, his head bent and shoulders hunched in a room too small for him. “It hooks you in, until you can’t stop. I’ve seen dozens of men fall foul of it. Once a day for you, Miss, and that is all.” 

Vala’s strength builds, and the days lengthen. She lies on her back, grabbing handfuls of the linen sheets, damp and crumpled from her long sleep. “Brunhild,” she begs. “Please, _please_ , you have to tell me what happened. I can take it, I promise.”

Brunhild darkens, but she can’t say no. Vala sees it in her eyes. So she drags her chair to Vala’s bedside, takes her in hand, and speaks in low voices, pausing often.

Húni is dead.

The shard of porcelain to the neck severed an artery, and he bled to death within minutes. The house was sent into a panic, relatives called for. Somehow, Kili and Úni got wind the game was up. Úni burst in through a little-known attic entrance, desperate to rescue Vala, and Kili was forced to follow. It seemed he knew nothing of her plan. While Húni’s kin began to arrive, Kili and Úni struck. They killed the guards quietly, systematically, and then they made it to the chamber where the failed poisoning had taken place.

“They saw a dam’s body, all burned from the fire. And your dreadlocks, all cut off. Úni recognised the trinkets woven into them. And all your clothes. A-And the belt.” Brunhild pauses for a moment to wipe at her eyes. “Mahal, child, they thought it was you. We _all_ thought it was you.”

“It was Signí,” Vala murmurs. Brunhild gasps, shakes her head.

“Oh, the poor dear... Why? What did she do?”

“She gave me the poison.” The guilt is eating her from the inside out. Oh, Signí. She never, ever, ever deserved to die like that. She never wanted any of this. The burn twinges and Vala tries not to think about what it must have been like for Signí, blind and mute and broken, unable to fight back as the fire consumed her.

She tries, but she can’t stop.

Vala listens silently as Brunhild picks up the thread of her story. The guard who locked Vala up was killed before he could tell anybody where she was. Believing, mistakenly, that Vala had been tortured and killed, Kili and Úni both flew into a violent rage. There was no more sneaking in the shadows; they spared the servant-girls but killed anybody else, including the cousins and uncles who breathlessly arrived to control the scene. They waited for them to enter, then cut them down. Only Mýr, who had heard there was fighting and remained at home like a coward, survived.

“What about Rúni?” Vala has to ask.

Brunhild breathes in heavily, closes her eyes. The tear-tracks swell afresh on her flushed cheeks. “Oh, the poor wee boy. That—That beast, Kili, slit his throat.”

Both Úni and Kili sustained heavy wounds in the fight, but they lived. In the morning, when the word had gotten out and everyone had been told to stay away, he threw open the doors to the house and stepped into the street. Crowds of dwarves had been watching and listening, the king’s guard was waiting outside, unsure who to take orders from. Kili stepped outside and looked at them all, clutching an open wound in his side, covered head to toe with blood, the word was from the witnesses. Terrified, shocked, disgusted, the dwarves did the only thing they could do.

“They dropped to their knees.” Brunhild whispers, exhausted. “Every single one of them, so Lína says. They knelt and bent their heads like he was their king. Forty dwarves dead, between him and Úni. Baldr, Bolgr, Fræg and Frar too. He—”

“What?” Hope swells. “Frar’s dead?”

“Yes, dear.” Brunhild clicks her tongue. “Not that—well, I don’t think a marriage would have happened either way, after what happened. But yes. He’s dead.”

Vala laughs until she cannot breathe.

* * *

But the story continues to unfold in Vala’s mind, long after Brunhild falls silent. Poor Rúni. He didn’t deserve to die. She wants to think that Kili was unthinkable in his rage, beyond reason, driven mad for the love of her. It makes it easier to bear. She doesn’t want to think of him as a child-killer, as someone who would kill dozens of dwarves in anger and revenge. Something disquiet rumbles in her stomach. Perhaps there was more to his wild savagery than she realised. Perhaps she should have heeded Fíak's warnings, when she first heard them. 

The life that had stretched out before her, that seemed so immutably carved into the stone, has been dashed to pieces. No Húni, no uncles, even, to watch over her and dictate their will. No Frar to dominate her. Everyone is gone. She’s broken, now, tarnished with the crime of murder. Vala is a ghost. Brunhild explains quietly that everybody thinks she is dead, that it was her body burning in the fire. She killed her brother. If word got out she was alive, she’d be made to face justice. She’d be another dam hanging by the rope as the rest of the Ironfists cursed and taunted her.

“What about Kili?” She challenges Brunhild. “What justice will he face for his slaughter?”

Brunhild shakes her head. “He will face his judgement from the Makers, mark my words.” But there’s nothing anyone can do. They’re all terrified of him. Her face is twisted and ugly in hatred; her family, what’s left of it, they all hate Kili for what he’s done to them. They refuse to consider him an ally. He’d save Vala from whatever fate the Orocani’s have set for her, but they don’t want that. They’d rather her dead than to turn to him after what has happened. He’ll never see her again.

She’s a prisoner. The realisation comes to her in small degrees. The door is locked whenever Brunhild leaves the room, and there are no windows. Whenever Vala asks about what happens next, when she’s better, Brunhild either pretends not to hear or changes the subject.

“I want to get up.” Vala tries one afternoon. “I need to walk. I need to have a proper bath. I stink. Can I just—”

“Magó has strict instructions.” Brunhild shakes her head. “The risk of infection is too great. Who knows what manner of diseases linger out there? Nay, Miss, you’re best in here, where we can make sure you’re safe from harm, until you’re no longer at risk.”

“And then what?” But once again, Brunhild pretends not to hear.

* * *

Vala is left alone at night, with only a few books for company, an embroidery-frame with a thick, blunt needle that can’t cause harm, an oil lamp. The faded, familiar snore from her girlhood wheezes through the locked door. She lies on the mattress, beneath the sticky linen bedsheet, her fingertips trailing slowly up her thighs. The freedom is still so strange to her, after nearly two decades of the iron cage. Flashes of Signí’s books reappear. The first unfurling shudder is an accident, the result of curious exploration, and Vala lies still for a long time afterwards, pulse thumping in her ears, chest heaving.

“Mahal,” she whispers up at the ceiling, dry-mouthed, afraid to move.

There’s nobody else to love her, so as the days pass, she loves herself. Is it wrong? Does it make her any less of a virgin? But the only person she could have asked is dead, concealed in a tomb that bears her name.

She imagines one time, in the stillness of the night, that Kili is in bed with her. It’s much faster than normal, it almost hurts, and Vala has to press her face into the pillow to keep quiet. The tears come afterwards, hot with grief and frustration and longing. She doesn’t know if it’s love or loneliness that cuts so sharply, but she has nobody else. No one who looked at her like he did, no one who reached out and touched her with such cautious sensitivity, no one who could look into her soul and read it so fluently. But it’s gone now. She’s dead to him and he can’t save her from this. Vala tries not to think of Kili again, in those lonesome, intimate moments. Sometimes, though, she can’t help it.

* * *

The door opens. Vala remains on her side, staring at the wall. It’s been weeks now, it must have been, she hasn’t bathed properly in all that time, and she feels the hot stickiness in her armpits, between her legs. She smells sour; perhaps she is rotting.

“Vala.” Her eyes open at the voice, cold, sharp, yet strangely fragile, as if she’ll break into tears any moment. “Mahal, I still can’t believe it.”

Vala rolls over onto her back. The nightgown rides up her thighs, but she ignores it. “I wondered when you’d come.” She says tonelessly. Freja is her jailer, she thinks, swinging the keys. She doesn’t want to look at her sister. She doesn’t want to see Freja leering in triumph for seeing her so reduced. 

“Magó says you’re doing well.” Freja’s voice grows as she crosses the room and takes Brunhild’s seat beside the bed. “But it’s not safe yet. Your burn won’t be healed for some time.” A pause. “Does it hurt?”

“Of course it fucking hurts.” Vala grits her teeth. “What do you think?”

A flash of movement at her side; Freja seems to reach out to take her by the hand, and then thinks better of it. “Why did you do it?”

What kind of a question is that? “You know why.”

“No, I don’t.” The fragility hardens, and Freja no longer sounds on the verge of weeping. “It was stupid. Rumour is you did it so Kili would marry you. That you were madly in love with one another.” Her laugh is high and mocking. “You, in love! You’re not in love. How could you be? What, did you just want to make Húni hurt?”

“I’d do it again.” Vala says, just to piss her sister off more than anything. Fuck her, for thinking she knew how she felt. For thinking she was beyond the capacity to love anybody. For a moment, though, she wonders if it’s true. “Without a second thought.”

Angered, Freja leans over, so Vala is forced to look at her. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Her face is stark white, eyes red and bloodshot. “How ruined we all are, because of you? Mýr wanted to give you up. He said we should let the courts have their way with you, hang you for murder. Even your precious Kili wouldn’t be able to save you.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Because he’s not a monster, Vala, whatever you may think.” Freja scowls, looking every inch the broody girl Vala remembers from years past. “But you have to do as you’re told. You want to live, sister, play nice.”

Of course there’s a catch to Freja’s so-called kindness. Vala sits up, looking her full in the eye now. Is she getting fat beneath her skirts, she wonders, or is she pregnant again? “Who am I going to marry then?”

“Marry?” She laughs. “You think anyone wants you?” Vala realises that Brunhild is standing by the closed door, her hands clasped, looking mournful. “You’re fallen, Vala. There’s only one place girls like you go.”

Shit. “If you mean some sort of whorehouse—”

“Oh, don’t be disgusting. Father would turn in his grave if I did that to you. Besides, no one would give a brass farthing to kiss you now.” Freja eyes the cloth wrappings that still cover half of Vala’s face.

“Freja.” Brunhild speaks up, admonishing her. Freja never grew up. She’s the same petulant, miserable child with a barbed tongue and a heart of iron.

Freja just sneers. “Why did you have to be so _stupid_? Frar wasn’t that bad. Why do you think you’re so special? You think you’re the first dam in the world to be chained to a dwarf you won’t want?”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” Vala spits, inflamed at her sister’s callousness. She was always so cruel. “When Mýr does the dirty and rolls over to sleep? That at least it’s over quickly? That hopefully this time it’s a boy so he doesn’t have to touch you anymore?”

The blow takes them both by surprise. Freja slaps her, hard, on the bandaged side of her face. Vala clutches at the wound, breathless, her ears ringing and specks of light blossoming behind her closed eyes and flames erupting along her skin.

“You _bitch!”_ Freja grabs the front of her filthy nightgown. “You spiteful little cunt!”

“Freja— _Freja!_ ” Brunhild seizes her by the arms, pulls her free. “Come now, no need to—”

“No, fuck her!” Freja stamps her foot, seizes the books scattered on the floor by the bed, hurling them into the fireplace. Vala watches, in too much pain to speak. “I did _everything_! I had to weep and beg and plead to Mýr to spare her. I crawled like a fucking dog on the floor to him!” She seizes the embroidery from the edge of the bed and flings it like a plate into the smouldering embers. Smoke belches from the fire as the vellum sluggishly burns. “The money Magó is getting to watch over you? I had to pawn some of my jewels for it. The girls cry at night for Brunhild because she’s here taking care of you. And you throw that back in my face. You nasty bitch.” Freja’s clenched fists are shaking as she looks for more things to burn. But there’s only Magó’s herbs and creams and oils, only the filthy bedsheets.

“I’m telling Magó, no more poppy-tears.” She growls. “That ought to dull your tongue.”

Vala doesn’t give her the satisfaction of crying. She shrugs off Brunhild’s warm embrace and lies on her side again, facing the wall, waiting in silence for the roaring throb to fade. Idiot. How was she fool enough to think for a moment that Freja might have loved her? 

* * *

There’s no books, no needlework, nothing to keep Vala’s hands busy now. Even her own tentative self-love becomes boring and routine. At night, she returns to her old training, pulling herself up by a crossbeam in the roof, balancing her body on her forearms and toes. She’s so weak; it’s a long way to go before she’ll be as strong as before.

She begs for news of the outside from Brunhild, who surely must be as bored and claustrophobic as her. It comes in tiny scraps; Kili has left, with Úni, who lost an eye and the use of his left arm, and was said to be nearly mad with grief. There’s no question of smuggling a message to him. In the end, two-thirds of the Ironfists joined their pilgrimage to a new land. The old families, those loyal to Húni and their house remained, cursing Durin’s Folk, looting and plundering abandoned homes and burning others. Empty streets became battlefields. Dozens of dwarves died.

“Oh, Miss Vala, you’ve started a war.” Brunhild shakes her head. “Don’t think you’re going to escape its consequences.”

Vala listens, realising the growing danger, the new noose was around her neck, tightening, tightening, tightening. What if they ran away, together, pretended to be mother and daughter, worked as seamstresses or scribes or washer-girls, in distant towns where nobody knew them? But there’s a guard in the front room, Vala can hear him talk sometimes, and no weapons. Her cups and bowls are made of wood, and she’s not allowed even a pin for her monthly cloth. She searches the room when she’s alone for anything that could be sharpened or filed, but finds nothing. They know Vala is dangerous – worse, she’s clever. And now she has nothing left to lose. Whatever happens next, she knows she will be completely helpless, unable to escape. Anything else is too risky.


	9. Chapter 9

Magó peels the cloth away, touches her new skin that feels so tight, so sensitive. He guides her hand up to feel it. Vala runs her fingertips over her neck, her jaw, the side of her face. Her left ear is shrivelled and shrunken; it feels like a pork rind. A handspan or so of hair on the back of her head has burned away to naked scar tissue, and will never grow back. It doesn’t need to be covered anymore, Magó says, and he sees no sign of infection. It’s healed, or as healed as it ever will be. His work is all but done.

“Can I see it?” It feels so smooth. So hairless. Vala imagines it must be thin, like paper. Looking over Magó’s shoulder, Brunhild sucks in a sharp breath.

“Not a good idea, Miss.” She reaches out, pats Vala on the knee. Her mouth is twisted in pity. “Perhaps in time, the scars may fade...?”

Magó shakes his head.

* * *

There’s a knock on the door. Vala is sitting on the floor by her bed, watching the flames dance in the grate, and doesn’t look up. But she hears the soft gasp from Brunhild, sees the white flash of her hands clenching in her periphery, and she knows that it’s time for whatever’s next.

One last, desperate grab for weapons. Nothing. It’s so soon. Vala stands as the door opens and Freja enters, with two guards close behind her. One is holding a pair of manacles.

“Freja,” she whispers, even though it’s useless. “Don’t.”

“You did this, sister.” There’s a restrained deadness to her face. She’s trying to stuff it all down, all the sorrow and pity and frustration. It’s so similar to what Húni did. “What else are we to do?”

Vala backs slowly towards the wall. “Just let me go. I’ll change my name, and I’ll never come back. I’ll be dead to you anyway. Please—No!” But the guards have her, and she squirms and struggles, but she’s not as strong as she was before her long convalescence, and they’re so broad and thick and burly. They force her on her knees, her hands behind her back, and she feels the iron tighten, the unmistakeable click of the lock.

“It’s the best place for you. The caretakers will be good to you. They won’t hurt you. They never hurt their girls.” Freja’s voice trembles for a moment.

Caretakers? “Where are you taking me?!”

“You’ll see soon enough.” Freja ignores her. “Brunhild, come.”

Brunhild bows her head, ever-compliant. “Yes, Mistress.”

* * *

They force her into a tiny, closed-in carriage with no walls, just a bench along each side, large enough for four people in close quarters. Brunhild sits beside her, the two guards opposite. The door is bolted shut. The dwarves instruct Brunhild to keep her hands in her lap.

The carriage sways, and Vala hears the clip-clop of hooves on cobblestones. “Please,” she whispers, low so the guards won’t hear, “Brunhild, we can take them. I’ll kick the one on the left in the face, knock him out, and you go for his knife.”

She wishes she could see Brunhild’s face in the gloom. “Nay. Miss Vala. Your sister is right, thought it pains me to admit. They’ll take care of you. You’ll come to learn penitence.”

Vala breathes slowly, in and out. “Where are they taking me?”

“The Caves of the Maker. A holy place.” In the darkness, Brunhild rests a hand on Vala’s knee. The guards don’t seem to notice. “The marriage halls of the Brides of Mahal.”

The brides. Vala’s heard about them. They’re anchorites, walled alive underground, pledge themselves to chastity, to pious prayers and hymn and rituals, marrying the name of the maker and shunning themselves from the outside world. They die in their tombs, and are left to rot in them.

“No.” That bitch Freja, she _can’t_ do this. “Brunhild, I don’t want to be a bride. I’d slit my own throat before being locked up in that prison. Please, talk to Freja. You’re the only person she’ll listen to. Tell her she can’t do this. I-I’ll just walk away, I’ll never come back. You’ll never know what happened to me. _Please_.”

“Come now, Miss.” The hand it still on Vala’s knee, and it tightens. “They’ll make me sit in the front if I agitate you.”

“Fuck them.” Vala screw her eyes up and leans her head against the wall. She’s going to be sick. “Fuck those bastards, all of them for doing this.”

“I’m sorry, Miss. Really, I am. I never wanted this to happen. You were always such a good girl. I was so proud of you. It’s that—that Kili, getting into your head. He—”

“Is that what you think happened?” Is Brunhild so blind to her plight? No. She can’t be. “I’ve been thinking about killing Húni for years. Kili didn’t put that thought inside of me. I used to dream about taking the carving knife and slitting his throat with it.”

“ _Hush_ , Vala.” She hisses. “It’s all right. The caretakers will cleanse you. They’ll get those awful ideas out of your mind.”

“They’re not awful. What Húni did was awful. He didn’t have the right.” That’s not true. Because he did have the right. He had the right to kill her, to cut her into pieces and feed her to his dogs, and no one would have lifted a finger to defend her. She’s the one that’s stained her name with the most brutal of crimes.

“It’s a cruel world, Miss.” She finally whispers. “I’m sorry.” Brunhild won’t say anymore, won’t condemn herself. Vala wishes she could know what her old nurse really thought. 

* * *

The dark rumbling, the gentle swaying of the carriage seems to stretch on forever. She’s going to run as soon as the doors open, while the guards are still stretching their stiff legs. She’ll catch them unawares, just run, run, run, forever. Perhaps Freja will just let her go. Probably not.

Finally, the carriage slows to a stop. Vala clenches her hands into fists behind her back. Her arms are stiff, fixed close behind her for so long, and she rolls her shoulders, trying to coax the blood to flow.

The lock is clicking. The guards mutter, and Brunhild draws in a sharp breath, seemingly readying herself. Then the door opens, and the light is pale and grey, from either dawn or dusk, searing after the long hours of muffled darkness, and Vala screws her eyes up against it. Heart in her throat, she ducks her head and bolts, a wild filly tearing through a half-open gate. The guards shout, caught out, and she pushes the carriage-door open. A dwarf is thrown to the ground on the other side, and Vala leaps down. There’s a thin, dusty track leading down into a valley, and she breaks into a run, her arms still bound behind her. Worry about that later.

Behind her, the guards shout and scrabble, but she doesn’t look back. Small, jagged stones bite into her bare feet, but she grits her teeth and pushes on. With each passing moment, her edge of surprise grows duller. The tread of boots grow louder, she can hear it under her heaving gasps for air, and even though she pushes on, Vala knows they’re getting closer and closer—

She screams as the dwarf barrels into her, knocking her down into the dust and wrapping his arms around her, pinning her to the ground. “You sneaky little bitch.” The guard hisses in her ear. One thick knee pushes in between her thighs, and it’s hard to breathe. “Think you can run from me?”

“Don’t hurt her!” Freja screeches, picking her way through the stones and dust in her thin silk slippers. “Bring her here, now!”

“As you wish, Lady Freja.” Vala looks down and sees her feet are bruised and bleeding. Strange. She doesn’t feel it. There’s just the burning in her lungs, the quiver of her limbs, the roaring thud of her heart. She wasn’t even close to escaping, and she’ll never get another chance.

“Happens more often than not.” An elderly dwarf is standing next to her sister, in a blood-red mantle over black robes. Some sort of priest. “It’s always the girls who behaved badly. But don’t worry, Your Ladyship. I promise we’ll take good care of her.” He lingers on her scar, and she can see his slight recoil, the flash of disgust. How bad does it really look?

“Vrái and Róki will take her now.” The temple is built into the side of a jagged cliff, made from smooth, clean-looking granite. Vala can’t look at it. Instead, she tries to focus on the cool press of the wind against her flushed, panting face.

What if this is the last time she feels a breeze?

The dwarves flinch too when they see her up close, take her chained arms. There’s a moment’s pause, for Freja and Vala to say goodbye to one another. Brunhild is weeping silently, a strand of hair floating across her face in the breeze.

“You’re glad I killed him.” Freja doesn’t deserve a goodbye. Fuck her. “You’re glad they’re all dead. The only reason you’re not standing here is because you never had the guts to do it.”

Freja doesn’t say a word. She just turns away, walks towards the waiting carriage, and Vala knows she’ll never see her again.

* * *

There’s no struggling, no screaming anymore. Vala follows dumbly as she’s led inside, down a hallway, and into a side-chamber. A shapeless grey dress awaits her, laid out across a low wooden bench, no underclothes, and a bucket of water and a lump of soap. The dwarves unchain her and leave her alone to bathe. The water is freezing and the soap is coarse and smells of pig-fat. Vala scrubs at her underarms and between her legs but can’t bring herself to douse her limbs, and instead soaks her bloodied feet, sitting on the bench in her new grey dress, the long skirts folded up around her knees. Her toes wrinkle and turn white.

One of the priests, the younger one, comes in with a cup of wine and some bread and cheese. “You must be thirsty,” he smiles, looking a little shy. Vala tries to gauge how old he is. “Drink up.” 

She does as she told, and then she’s taken into a hall with high slit windows. Pale, watery daylight filters through; so it was dawn, then. She watches the beams of light, far above her head. A statue of Mahal and his life-giving hammer is carved in a white, polished stone, his eyes inlaid with brilliant blue gems.

Vala’s legs weaken. The dwarves, Vrái and Róki, drag her along, stumbling. Her head is swimming, her hands and feet feel disconnected from her body. There must have been something in the wine.

“There you go.” Her head sinks forward, limp and powerless and it’s so terrifying. What do they want to do to her? Why are they so afraid that she’ll fight back?

 “Shit, I gave her too much,” one warns the other, his voice low. It’s not clear who. “Bjarni won’t be happy.”

“It’s worse when they scream. It sets the other girls off. Besides, I’ve heard about this one. They’re putting her here to keep her out of trouble. Why does it matter if she remembers?” 

“My name’s Vala,” she slurs. Maybe they haven’t been told.

But the dwarf – the older one, she thinks, it must be – snickers. “We know.”

* * *

Memory slips away, fades into darkness. It’s like the poppy-tears that Magó gave her, but there’s no rush of warmth and pleasure – she’s just gone, and wakes again, on a thin mattress. She can feel the crooked wooden boards beneath it. A coarse linen bedsheet covers her, and a musty-smelling blanket. Perhaps it’s wool.

Her eyes crack open. The fog hangs heavy over her head, and it’s hard to see.  The room is dim, and so, so small. She could stretch both arms out and nearly touch the sides. It’s bare, barren, just the narrow bed, a table and a stool before it, a single oil lamp burning steadily. A bucket in the corner with a lid. Vala tries to sit up, to look around, but her body won’t obey her.

Something moves in the corner of her eye, someone approaching her, head bent against the low ceiling. Behind it, Vala sees the distant, golden beam of sunlight through a low, low doorway. A pile of bricks is stacked beside it, and a basin of what must be mortar.

“I didn’t think you’d wake yet.” The voice is soft, too soft. She doesn’t trust it. The dwarf’s face looks narrow, tired. It’s the older. He’s got another cup in his hand. “Just drink this. It’ll be easier.”

He presses the cups to her mouth. She shakes her head, keeps her lips closed, and the dwarf climbs onto the bed, his knee on her chest, one arm grabbing her by the wrists, pinning her hands over her head.

“Drink,” he repeats, the softness disappearing. His knee digs in. Vala opens her mouth but closes her throat on instinct, holds her breath. “You only need a mouthful. There you go.” She mimes a swallow, keeps her mouth slack. The wine pools between her half-open lips, dark and invisible.

Then he lifts himself up, releases the burden. She looks out of the corner of her eye and waits until his back is to her before turning her head, spitting the poisoned wine onto the pillow.

He’s walling her alive, while she’s too drugged to move, or so he thinks. She watches, her eyes open a crack, feigning sleep. They’ve claimed her now, and it’s time to trap her within their walls for ever. A lifetime of prayer and piety and penitence, scrabbling for deliverance in a world that has cast her out. The panic fills her quickly, pushing against the wine, forcing a chill down her limbs. “Get up,” she whispers, so quietly the breath fades in her throat. “Get the hell up before you die in here.”

The priest works quickly, his head and shoulders bent. The wall is at his ankles, then his knees. They must leave a slit to pass bread through, pails of water. The brides are said to live two hundred years or more, within their four stone walls.

She wouldn’t wait to find out. Vala runs her eyes around the room. It’s so empty. Perhaps she could take the lantern, smash the glass and use it to cut his throat. Or his trowel, that looks sharp. She could drive the iron tip in between his ribs, into his lungs, let him drown in his own bubbling blood.

Vala breathes in deeply, willing the fog to lift from her body, flexing her fingers and toes to persuade the feeling to return. “Come on,” she whispers. If she doesn’t do it now, it will never happen. Nobody except Freja knows she is even here. Nobody will come to save her.

The dwarf sighs, sets down his trowel, and lifts his head. Vala snaps her eyes closed. His boots thud over the stone, growing closer, and a moment later, she feels the bedclothes shift over her body. “They said you were a virgin.” He sits down on the edge of the bed; she feels the weight of him. Fingertips graze her face, the unscarred side. “Such a waste.”

He leans in, presses his lips lightly against hers, and runs a hand along her thigh, underneath the hem of her skirt, moving slowly upwards. She feels the hitch of his breath, the excitement.

Now. Vala clenches her hand into a fist, opens her eyes, and brings it crashing into his right temple. The dwarf gasps his grip falters, stunned. She rolls him off of her and they both come crashing onto the ground. Signí taught her how to fight back in moments like these. Vala wraps her arm around his neck, her elbow against the knot in his throat, and pulls and squeezes with everything she has. He’s a book-reader, a prayer-giver, a mason every once in a while, but he isn’t a fighter, not like those guards of Freja’s, and he doesn’t have the strength or skill to fight back.

The dwarf scrabbles at her forearm, bucks against her, kicks out along the ground and gasps and gurgles for air, but she has him now. It’s quick and quiet. He groans after a few moments, falls slack. Sometimes they die, sometimes they just fall unconscious for a while. She doesn’t pause to check. How long until the others notice he’s missing? Vala scrabbles in his pockets and finds a few silver coins. Little help tonight. The other priest may be about, and she needs a weapon. Another thought seizes her, and she tugs the long, loose dress over her head, tearing a seam in her desperation. His clothes are a little too big in the waist, too long in the leg, but they’ll do. She dresses in his long trousers and tunic and boots, takes the trowel, throws the cloak he’d discarded on the floor over her shoulders. If she pulls up the hood, then perhaps she’ll slip past.

Vala steps out into the hall. The sun has set, but a pale beam of moonlight filters through the high slit windows. Her head covered, she looks around. This is a room she remembers, with the stone statue of Mahal against the back wall.

Then she sees it – every six or seven feet, open spaces just below eye level in the brickwork of just a foot high and wide. It’s where the priests pass through daily bread, bowls of water, books of prayer. Too small to squeeze through and escape, large enough to look through, to catch glimpses of the world outside. Are they looking at her, she wonders, imagining their large, hungry eyes. Do they know it’s not a priest beneath this cloak?

Vala imagines, for a moment, a rescue. She imagines tearing the hammer out of Mahal’s stone hands, smashing the bricks to pieces. She imagines their terrified faces peering through the rubble, their bony hands outstretched in thanks. But it’s all a dream. She would need an army to tear down these walls. Vala walks with her head bent, her hands clenched, hoping beyond hope that no one will realise a dam walks the halls, call out to her, and beg for her to save them. She couldn’t bear it, if they did that.

The passageway is nearly pitch-black. Vala holds her breath and tries to walk quietly in her strange new boots. It’s been months since she wore anything on her feet, and never anything this thick and heavy. A streak of light catches her – a fire beneath the door. She makes her way towards it, knuckles white around the trowel’s wooden handle.

The door opens silently. It’s a small, clean room, with two narrow beds, similar to the one she’d just been lying in. This must be where the priests sleep. The younger is hunched over a table, reading to himself, his voice a low mumble.

Vala only has one chance for this. She goes for surprise over stealth, crosses the room quickly. The young dwarf hears her, looks up. His mouth forms an ‘o’ of surprise, but before he can speak, she has him, gripping his russet-coloured hair, forcing his head up, pressing the trowel against his throat so he can’t look at it. But she knows he can feel the sharp edge of metal.

“If you scream,” she says, “I will slit your throat. Do you understand?”

The dwarf just nods. “Good.” Vala yanks on his hair, forcing him to stand. “Take me to your front door. Is it locked?” He nods. “Do you have a key?” Another nod.

“Lead the way.” She shoulders the door open. Quivering, stumbling in his fear, the dwarf – is it Vrái or Róki? – walks down the passageway, turns left.

“This better be right.” She warns. “If you’re leading me into a trap, I’ll bleed you like a pig.” Hopefully he hasn’t seen that it’s not a knife in her hand.

“I—” He gasps, catches himself. “It’s not. I-I promise.”

“Good.” She hopes he pisses himself in his terror, after what he did to her. “Where’s your master? The elder priest.”

“S-Sleeping.”

“Anyone else? Anyone keep guard? Or is it just you three.”

“I-In the day, there’s others. But just us at night.” He whimpers. “Please, I’m so sorry. Don’t hurt me.”

“Do as I say, and I won’t have to.” Vala’s twisted one hand behind his arm and she tugs on it now. Hopefully it hurts. “Just take me to your front door.”

“Here.” He gasps after a time, scrabbling at the latch with his free hand. “I-I need to unlock it.”

“Then hurry up.” Vala growls. But what will she do with him next? How does she keep him quiet? She’ll have to kill him, else she’ll never escape. For a moment, she almost pities him. But then she remembers that row of windows, those blind, open eyes, those mouths that had been silenced forever. They were so matter-of-fact when they took her. The other dwarf laid his hands on her like it was routine, one first – last – fuck before walling her alive.

It was all lies, the talk of the brides. They weren’t willing servants who sought a life of piety and chastity, to devote themselves to Mahal. They were victims. They were dams like her, who had been forced to do things to survive, things that others declared a crime, things that their brothers and husbands and father were able to do without a whisper against them. They were brought here to die quietly, to eek out a lonely life of penance rather than hang from the rope.

The dwarf pushes the door open with a little gasp. There’s a cool night breeze, chillier than she expected. “Please,” he whimpers. “I—I won’t tell anybody. I’ll go back to my room and tell them I didn’t see or hear anything.”

The point of the trowel is nearly cutting off his air. He’s shaking, his limbs weak, and Mahal, Vala knows she needs to drive the tool into his chest or belly, but she can’t do it. Instead, she kicks his legs out from under him, and while he’s on his knees, gasping, she gets him again and again and again, her boot to his ribs, until he’s curled up on his side, wheezing, immobilised.

“If you follow me, I will kill you.” She promises, crouching down to spit the words in his ear. If she knew where to go, if she had the luxury of time, Vala would rob the kitchens, load a sack with cheese and salted pork, a skin of wine – food to last a long journey. But she doesn’t have that.

The air is bitterly cold, and stings in her lungs. Vala stands on the threshold and breathes in. A breeze whips across her face, and she sees, in the glimpse of moonlight, snowflakes on the sleeve of her shirt. She closes the doors, and threads the trowel through the iron handles. It just fits. Hopefully that will buy her a little more time. Vala steps back, her shoulders hunched against the cold, watching the breath mist from her quivering lips.

What now? She turns and looks across the valley. There’s no distant flame, no hearth or fire that could welcome her. The landscape is barren and lonely. Despite the bitter cold, a heat swells inside of her. She is _free_. For the first time in her life, the world stands before her, no locks, no keys, nothing to chain her. A grin spreads across Vala’s face at the thought.

Where now? Not home again, never. No Freja, no Mýr, no control and abuse and domination from people who wanted to hurt her. Erebor? She imagines, for a moment, the world there waiting for her. Úni’s desperate, impotent love. Kili’s dark uncertainty. Something stirs in her chest, pushes out in protest. Vala bites her lip at the memory of Kili, of the way he looked at her in those low-cut dresses, at his mouth pressed so delicately against hers. Her hand comes up now, over the smooth, puckered skin of her scar. Will he still want her now she is ugly? Would it be freedom, to make her own way to Erebor? Or would it just be another form of control, one brother for another, someone who wanted to shelter her from the world, convinced that his own possessive guardianship was the only thing that would save her?

Or somewhere else, the unknown, where her name means nothing. A distant town or clan where she can slip into another life, and leave it all behind. Let Vala stay dead. 

Whatever happens next is her decision, and hers alone. 

Without warning, of its own accord, a great whoop erupts from her. And she runs, in her new, sturdy boots, down the valley, into freedom.

**Author's Note:**

> And that's that. Hope you guys love bittersweet, ambiguous endings :) 
> 
> Obviously this isn't the end of the story - I am working through the next part (which will really be the end, when that is complete), where Vala will obviously feature as a character. No way I would build all of this up and have her just vanish forever. It's still very much in an early draft, in-progress stage, so will be a little while, but I'm excited at how it's coming along. I really get to play with structure and style and do something new - hopefully you guys like it, haha. 
> 
> Thanks everyone for reading!! Hopefully I'll see you all soon <3


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